


the too-huge world vaulting us

by mustinvestigate



Series: Nora Freis [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Slow Burn, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, finally the porn, get to the porn already, really slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-05 07:02:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 65,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5365802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d have a heck of an easier time dealing with Winlock and Barnes without her lurking around the door of the Third Rail’s back room, perched on the arm of a threadbare stuffed chair like she’s jumped out of a pre-war spank mag. She doesn’t look real – she can’t <i>be</i> real – but he can’t take his glare off the two men for even a second to get a good look.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He’d have a heck of an easier time dealing with Winlock and Barnes without her lurking around the door of the Third Rail’s back room, perched on the arm of a threadbare stuffed chair like she’s jumped out of a pre-war spank mag. She doesn’t look real – she can’t _be_ real – but he can’t take his glare off the two men for even a second to get a good look.

"Can't say I'm surprised to find you in a dump like this, MacCready," Winlock sneers.

"Can't say I'm surprised it took you so long to find me," he replies. "You run out of one-eyed trackers and have to let the blind ones off the leash?"

It's bull and they all know it. The last three months have driven him half mad, using every trick in his book to break up the trail behind him while still sniffing out enough employment to keep body and soul together. Forget about pulling together the kind of nest egg he'll need to hire a merc even tougher and crazier than himself and finally crack Med-Tek labs. It's some kind of twisted miracle he's evaded them this long. "You want to make this easy on yourselves, we can take it outside?"

He's almost sure he knows Goodneighbor's back alleys and fire escapes better than them. Even a couple seconds' running start, and he can maybe give them the slip. Start over somewhere else, maybe the Combat Zone.

They only laugh at him. "We're just messengers, MacCready."

He thinks the woman's eased into the chair. She hasn't made a sound doing it, but now all he can see from the corner of his eye behind Barnes is her giant leather boots, one over the other and bouncing slightly.

"You forget I left the Gunners for good? We've got nothing to say to each other."

"Yet you're still taking jobs in the Commonwealth," Barnes says, showing his teeth. "That's funny. No, funny's the wrong word. Stupid, that's the right word. Or maybe foolhardy. Foolhardy sound good to you?" he asks Winlock, who cracks his knuckles.

"I don't take reading lessons from you." Maybe it's the audience the Gunners don't know they've got, but MacCready's mouth works faster than his brain. As usual. "So why don't you take your girlfriend and your mint copy of 'Dick and Jane Visit the Jagoff Factory' and walk out of here while you still can?"

"What? Winlock, tell me we don't have to listen to this shit." The two men share an exasperated glance and catch sight of her at the same time, their heads whipping comically, twice, almost in unison. She returns their glare with a nonchalant nod, taking a sip of the warm beer in her hand and grimacing slightly.

“Gentlemen,” she says, and lifts her arm to fiddle with her Pip-Boy – cripes, one of _those_. Moments later, the Red Menace theme tinkles from its speakers.

MacCready presses forward, taking advantage of their distraction. "Let the nice barbarians of the Third Rail enjoy their martinis without any of your teeth splashing in 'em."

Barnes starts to snap back, but Winlock holds up a hand, glancing back at the stranger. "The only reason we haven't riddled you with bullets is because we don't want a war with Hancock. We play the game. We respect borders. It's something you never learned."

"Glad to have disappointed you," MacCready scoffs.

Winlock shakes his head. "Fine, play the tough guy. But we hear you're working in Gunner territory, all bets are off. You hear?"

"You finished?" MacCready asks, turning his back on them to sit down without waiting on an answer. He's pretty sure his hands are shaking hard enough to spot from the street outside.

"Yeah, we're finished here," Barnes growls, trading hairy eyeballs with Winlock again. At least he hasn't let them totally accomplish what they came for. He can cling to that.

They stare at the woman, necks swivelling as they detour around her crossed legs and out the door, but she doesn’t favour them with another tilt of her fine head. Only once they’re gone does she snap a dial, silencing the catchy theme mid-play, and turn to MacCready.

He takes a moment to let her, all of her, sink in: about his age or younger, tall, kinky brown hair in a messy bun at her neck, worthless leather thong knotted decoratively around her neck, black eye going to yellow, scattering of fresh stretch marks low on her belly, even fresher scars on her arms and legs…all of which he sees clearly, because the broad’s wearing a gosh-darned Grognak costume! The knee-high boots cover the most skin; otherwise, it’s just a bikini top and high-cut skirt, neither of which totally cover her underwear and bra! It’s more flesh than he’s ever seen on a woman, even ones he’d been actively fucki- having relations with, right there on display in the freaking Third Rail!

And the top hat. Somehow, the top hat is the last thing he notices, even after the heavy modified 10mm slung on her hip, the latter of which goes some way to explaining how she got through the Rail, through goshdarned Goodneighbor, in that get-up without being chewed to bits.

“The bartender said you’re looking for work.”

He nods, looking at her Pip-Boy, and man, that brings back memories. Most of them ok ones of the smart-mouthed lady who used their caves as a waystation on her travels, paying in Nuka-Cola and toys for the littles; the rest of them very bad memories, after it all went south. That ghoul of hers, and the smelly old raider, the ones who followed her as loyally as that dog the kids loved, ransacking Lamplight and the silent vault behind for any scrap of her left behind, finding nothing. Bad, bad times.

And it’s not just the Pip-Boy that reminds him of that lady, that makes this one stink of a vault. There’s more to her than you see on people, generally. Nothing you can pin down, just a feeling that her bones are a touch thicker, her muscles a shade more solid, her skin a prick less penetrable, like all those years of solid grub and restful sleep adds up to inch more all around than she should have.

And she’s sure put it on view.

"If you're looking for a hired gun, sure. You want a friend to preach about the Atom with, best you keep moving."

She takes a long sip of her beer, watching him over the bottle. "That those guys in the robes?" she asks finally.

He's still keyed up from the narrow escape, spitting hostility. Decides it's best to keep his mouth shut for another moment, until his heart settles back into an older rhythm, and only nods.

"I found a whole fort of them dead, once. If that's what preaching gets you, call me a godless red Commie."

She waits a moment for his response to that, and, getting none, continues. "So how about you just explain those two nice fellows who seemed so sure you aren't available for work?"

"Just a couple of morons looking to climb the ladder of success by stepping on everyone else on the way up. That's the Gunners' way."

"Healthy-looking bunch, lots of combat armour?" She touches a scar on her shoulder that might be from a 50mm round. "Yeah, I've met them. Charmers. Sad to say, they don't get on very well with my friends, so I've never had them over for cocktails."

"They're the biggest gang in the Commonwealth, practically a cult. Got a rep for being crazy, and they've earned it. I ran with them for a while because the money was good, but I never fit in. So, I made a clean break and went solo."

"And they're not the kind of friends who let go of the good times so easily."

She talks funny, like in the old holotapes the kids found back in the vault behind the cave, so long ago. Fast but sharp, filling out every word, loud as if there’s a whole crowd in the room and she’s got to keep all their ears on her.

"No," he agrees. "Not so much. So what about you - what's the job?"

"Long-term," she says, and his finally slowing heart kicks up again. "A few weeks at least. I'm going to clear out a few Raider holes in the city, then on out in the suburbs too if it goes well, and I need a second gun to back me up."

Raiders? Raiders are easy, so long as you see them first. He could sing at the promise of a few weeks' easy work. But raiders flourish in the city because there's too many of them to really take on, and you rarely get that first bead on them. "Why? Who's paying you?"

She tilts her head and thinks before responding. "A few of these are contract jobs, and others are a little freelance project of my own." She shrugs. "Mostly, I just want to kill them and take all their stuff, for a change."

_Count me in_. "What's my cut of the scav?"

"You'd get a percentage."

"What percentage are we thinking of here? Maybe one with a couple of numbers that aren't 'zero and a bullet in MacCready's back'?"

She blinks. "I haven't decided on that yet. It'll depend on how good you are, how much we haul away together."

"'It'll depend' ain't good enough, sister. Let's say 50 caps a week, minimum, rising to 20-per as you catch up to me and start pulling your weight."

She shrugs. "Agreed."

_Shoot. Should have doubled it._ "And 250 caps up front. No room for bargaining."

She smiles without her eyes crinkling. "Everything's negotiable. Let's say 200 caps."

"Lady, do I need to call Barnes back in to define my words for you? I said, 'no room for bargaining'."

She pulls a stuffed coin purse from her boot. "Let's say, I've only got 200 caps on me. So it's not so much 'bargaining' as 'take it or leave it'. Go ahead and count them. I'll wait." She wrinkles her nose. "This beer isn't getting any flatter."

He pockets the bag without opening it. "You just bought yourself an extra gun, Lady."

"Nora." She holds out her hand, patiently waiting until he takes it. Her palm is clammy from the lukewarm bottle.

“Robert Joseph MacCready.”

"Well," she raises her eyebrows. "I'm still just Nora."

They gear up, the pack she'd hidden behind the chair obviously far heavier than his, and he decides to take it as a good sign she doesn’t immediately demand they redistribute the weight. It’s probably another good sign that, when Nora raises a hand toward Magnolia on the way out, the singer winks and coquettishly over-enunciates the next few lines. Magnolia’s been something like a friend, sharing the occasional beer at the end of the night and sending a couple of clients back his way.

He can’t help but notice that no one else in the bar even blinks at Nora’s outfit, or lack of one. Neither does Daisy, when his new boss trades a couple of lunchboxes full of Jet and a pack’s weight of lousy guns and armor for a fusion core. It boggles the mind.

“Look,” he says, “I got to ask…”

“What?” she replies, with a sidelong glance that’s meant to look innocent, and he almost loses his nerve. The way she moves in it, like it’s an ordinary old suit same as anyone around them has on, everyone else ignoring it, makes him feel like the weirdo for bringing it up. But he’s got to know.

“So you’re a big Grognak fan?”

She ducks her head, but he can still make out a faint quirk of a smile. Fine. She can laugh at him all she wants, so long as the caps keep flowing.

“Yeah,” she replies. “A big fan. I grew up on Grognak comics. And I went through hell to get this costume, this and another one, and it, well…”

She trails off, then shrugs. “It makes me feel strong.”

_Freak_ , he thinks. _Total freak_. “Well, boss, we see any giant snakes or damsels, they’re all yours.”

“Deal.”

One of Hancock’s guards whistles as her as they pass, and MacCready feels his world get a little more sane. The new boss doesn’t twitch an eyelid, just taps the brim of her top hat in greeting.

“What’s your calibre?” she asks as they pass the Memory Den, gesturing for him to stop by the communal cooking pot.

“Quite a personal question, ain’t it?” he replies, but shrugs the sniper rifle’s strap off his shoulder and holds it toward her.

She ignores it for a moment, dropping her pack and fishing out a couple of bloody, leather-wrapped bundles. Her nose wrinkles as she unwraps them; his twitches: meat, and fresh at that. She spreads the chunks on the metal rack over the flames next to the pot and rolls up the leather – leg armour, he sees, hacked to near-useless strips – with the bloody side in before returning it to her pack. Looking at her filthy hands, she sighs, and rubs them half-clean on her Grognak skirt before finally taking the rifle from him.

He tries to be subtle, glancing his own hands while she lifts his – his! – gun to her shoulder and sights through the scope. His nails are dark to the quick, two of them black and dead after slamming them in shifting rubble the week before, and every crease is picked out in grime. Working hands.

“Nice piece,” she declares, swinging the rifle to hand it back to him butt-first. He hefts it diagonally back over his shoulders, the same smooth motion he’s made a thousand times since he took the rifle off a troublesome raider’s corpse more than a decade before.

“You’re not the first to say so,” he smirks, relief settling with the familiar weight of his piece on his back.

She snorts at that, not looking at him, and flips the meat over. Juices drip and sizzle, and his stomach tries to crawl up his throat to catch them. “I don’t have anything on me for it, but you should have a rummage through the armoury when we get to Sanctuary. We’ve got some spare parts and ammo for most guns.”

Still crouching, she shows him her own weapons, introducing them by name: a scoped laser rifle (“Sparky”), a combat shotgun (“Boomer”), and a 10mm (“Little Shooty”). He keeps it together until the last one, but at “Little Shooty,” he’s done, leaning one-handed on the nearest wall, harsh crow-caws of laughter forcing their way up from his chest, and even as he can feel the 200 caps leaping out his pocket and his leaden feet shuffling back to the Third Rail to await another caps cow, he only thinks again, _Little Shooty_ , and laughs harder.

When he can finally stand, wiping the tears from his eyes and sniffling snot back in his nose like a kid on a crying jag, he sees most of the street’s drifters and suits staring at them (he doesn’t bother to watch long enough to identify amusement or contempt in those faces), and he sees the boss still kneeling by the pot, staring into the flames, sniggering through her nose in unladylike snorts. It’s almost enough to start him off again, but she shakes her head and take a deep, shaky breath.

“You’ve got – you’ve got to find something to laugh at, make something silly, in all this horror. You understand?”

_Little Shooty_ , he thinks again, and bites his lip hard enough to bruise. He kneels next to her, where she’s laid out the three guns, and responds instead, “Well, I showed you mine, so…”

She waves him on and goes back to poking the meat as he picks up the shotgun first. “In any case, it’s faster to use silly names, if we have to trade guns quickly. I prefer to take out my targets from a distance, as I’d assume you do too, but close combat is inevitable. If you don’t have a short-range piece, you can borrow Boomer or Little Shooty…I’d prefer you don’t use Sparky outside of extreme necessity, though. He’s my favorite.”

“Well thanks for introducing me to your babies. They all seem like swell kids.” The shotgun is a thing of beauty, with a thick drum mag and a heavy receiver, and although he’s got less than no experience with electric weapons, he gets the impression the bulky scoped laser rifle may be just as fine. Even the 10mm looks more serviceable than most, with another long mag, compensated body, and a strange grip and trigger configuration he's never seen before. “You mod these out yourself?”

Silence tears his attention away from her beautiful death machines. The amusement has dropped off the boss’ face like a lead plate, leaving it tight and pale. She blinks, hard, as if his glance has lit across the fire as a slap, and forces a small, sickly smile.

“I could now,” she says, her voice breaking. She clears her throat and goes on. “But these are cobbled together from about a dozen pieces I…found. Specifically, on men I shot down like rabid animals, or possibly the rabid animal in question was myself.”

_Shoot_ , he realises, _Who’s the freak here, all “You’re not the first to compliment it,” “I’ll show you mine”…she’s shipping out alone with a guy she’s just met, and he’s making di-junk jokes like they’re going outta style. Classy. Real classy._

He spent too dang long with the Gunners, is all, undoing most of the good work Lucy put in civilising him. He adds “Knock off the sex jokes” to the top of his “Be A Better Person” list and wonders if there’s any way to tell the boss he’s really not a rapist without sounding even more like one.

The breeze shifts, and she coughs, muttering, “Damn smoke,” rubbing her eyes.

“Yeah,” he agrees and clears his own throat, both words and action too forceful. “Your dinner’s near to burning.”

“Shit.” She snatches the meat off the grate, dropping them onto two plates he hadn’t noticed her set out, licking her scorched fingers. He can just make out a whispered “motherfucker” as she thumps down to sit, knees primly together, on an upturned cooking pot. “Molerat or dog?”

“Hmm?” he grunts, tearing his eyes away from the small feast with a guilty twitch. It’s been too damn long since he’s seen food that didn’t come out of a can, tasting like rust.

“They’re both pretty gamey, but I lean a little further away from dog meat than I do rat. Have you a preference?” She picks up the plate of molerat chunks, tilting it toward him with a raised eyebrow.

“How much?” he asks before he thinks, feeling the weight of her 200 caps in his pocket. He needs every damn one of them to start paying off whatever the Gunners have decided he owes, but the smell of hot, fresh meat is too much.

She frowns at that, and he licks his lips before getting his poker face on. She’s already got him on the back foot, though, darn it. He tells his hopeful stomach to take a walk.

“We should have a contract,” she finally replies, slowly. “As we seem to have different expectations of your position.”

“Okay…” he replies, just as slowly. His trigger finger itches. _A contract? You point, I shoot, what’s to discuss?_

“And the confusion likely to result from such an asymmetric understanding could be deadly, literally, given the situation I’ve hired you for.”

“Sure,” he returns, stalling for time to think. It’s not just her tone that’s changed but her whole attitude, like she’s pulled on one of those fancy suits the Diamond City toffs swan around in on the upper decks. She reminds him of Princess, suddenly, and with that recognition he wishes this was a conversation he could end like a mayoral race, with a fist to her nose.

He wonders how long they’ll last out there, if they’ve managed to mortally offend each other in his first twenty minutes of employment.

“For instance, because constant travel is an essential aspect of your role, as employer I am responsible for your room and board,” she shrugs, “such as I’m able to provide. Medical assistance, within reason, even some provisioning. Would you disagree?”

“No…?” he replies, struggling translate her clipped babble into real words. Best he can figure, it breaks down to “I’ll give you free stuff, when I feel like it,” which isn’t entirely unfamiliar in his experience with employers, but there’s always been a hook in it.

“And in return,” _Aha_ , he thinks, “I expect as much loyalty as I’ve bought. No bullets in my back, no petty theft. I’m happy to hear your suggestions, but in the end, my orders are _the_ orders. Agreed?”

“You’re the boss,” he replies through gritted teeth, snatching the plate of dogmeat from the street. As if he needs to be told he’s only allowed to kill those he’s paid to! And “petty theft?” Hah. He’d no more steal from an employer than shoot them in the back, but if folk – particularly the right kinda folk – can’t be bothered to look after their valuables in any serious way, so what if they go in his pocket? Her high-handed attitude leaves a sour taste that almost ruins the first solid meal he’s had since leaving the Gunners, but he bolts it down in moments anyway, cracking the bone to get at the marrow inside.

The warmth in his belly goes a mile toward soothing his resentment, enough so he can stand to look at her after dropping the sucked-dry bone into the fire. 

Her mouth gapes open a little, as if she forgot how to take a bite with her hand halfway there. She drops her meat back to the plate and holds it out. “I already ate today. Not hungry enough for rat.”

Her half…butted lies do nothing to take the sting out of charity, but an uncomfortably stuffed stomach easily sits on the remains of his pride. He smothers a belch behind his hand and follows as she takes her pack into the space between the barricade and the latrine. He turns his back – mostly, as there’s a gap behind her a threat could possibly squeeze through – but his efforts at sparing her modesty are wasted. She doesn’t change out of the ridiculous costume, only wiggle into the bottom half of some ragged road leathers, buckling it underneath the skirt, then strap on some decent combat armor pieces over her legs, arms, and torso, trading the top hat for a helmet. If anything, she looks more ridiculous now, the remaining strips of bare flesh more jarring. 

_Begging for a bullet or quick blade_ , he tells himself, firmly. A strange glint catches his eye as she unties the leather thong from her neck to re-knot it more firmly, and he leans closer to see.

Catching the movement, she freezes, her arms splayed open and hands suddenly clenched together behind her neck. She watches him for a long moment, then peeks past his shoulder, before loosening her grip with an effort so obvious he expects tendons to creak and opens her hand at waist level.

There’s two rings knotted into the leather, near the ties, where her hair would have covered them. Gold. Thick. He knows immediately he could get at least 250 caps apiece, more if he found a specialist in useful metals. One’s larger than the other, and it comes to him from somewhere: _husband…wife…_ Old World stuff. Like a Vault tribe might keep up.

Wordlessly, she turns her back and re-ties the leather necklace, the gold pressed between leather and skin, so it looks from the front like the silly necklaces kids make for their sweethearts.

_No petty theft_ , he thinks again, the tight anger in his chest easing ever so slightly, and reaches under her helmet to tug the sloppy bun a little lower, completely covering her hiding spot. She must expect the touch, or at least doesn’t flinch from it, but only turns back with a brisk nod.

“You ready?”

_Not at all_. “Yeah.”


	2. Chapter 2

She’s not quite the delicate vault disaster he expected. She’s slow, is all, and too careful, constantly scanning the road ahead through her scope and moving from cover to cover even when he could tell her it’s quiet. He doesn’t, in any case, wanting to get a bead on exactly the depth of the hot mess he’s got to clean up after. She tells him that their first target is at the corner of whatever-and-whatever streets, and at his blank look, changes that to “kinda halfway between here and Bunker Hill, except not the raider den right next to the mutant den, the one with more heads on pikes than whole bodies.”

“Right,” he replies, “That one. It’s got a lot of street-level cover. We should start on the roof across the street, could probably take out their best-armed guards before rushing it.”

She hums in thought. “Agreed. You know the way?”

He does. Or did. He flings an arm up in her face before she can step any closer to the line of frag mines mostly hidden in the dry grass. “Change of plans,” he whispers, pointing them out to her.

She nods, but whispers, “Wait. Step back.”

Reluctantly, he does so, hoping she’s just going to do her usual hour-long glare through the scope before moving. Instead, she creeps closer to the nearest mine, scuttling faster when it starts to beep.

He freezes, every instinct screaming to make for the broken wall across the street, but sees that flash of gold in her palm, cupped low between them, and tries to make the second they’ve got last long enough to come up with any plan to tackle her out of the way that doesn’t throw them both into more mines.

No, he’ll run, he’s going to run, and she’ll just…

She flips the mine upright, carefully catching it by the rim with the other hand, and flicks off the arming switch on the bottom. She lets out a breath and grips it over her head in a moment’s silent triumph before handing it carefully to him.

He’s not sure when he got close enough to her to take it, but he finds the safety latch and stows it. Good caps in these, he thinks, the words drifting like a fart in the high wind that is his adrenaline-twanged brain. He follows like a drone as she repeats the process with three other mines, then spends what feels like half the night staring around them for others before motioning him to take point again.

Their attack unfolds like a dream. Raiders’ strength is in the hit and run, attacking those weaker than their group for all the supplies as they can carry and disappearing before reinforcements can arrive. Even their territory skirmishes are limited by a reluctance on both sides to lose too many fighters. In their home territory, against better trained fighters who only want to kill them and take their stuff, they’re much less effective.

Heck, they can’t even hold against a siege for ten minutes. He and she pick off those they can scope in turns – and she’s pretty good, he’s pleased to note, and even more pleased to judge himself better; she aims for the large targets, torsos and legs, while he can pull off a clean headshot more often than not – and the rest of the gang, tucked back in relative safety, try to rush them. Only their grenades hold any real danger to them in their perch, and MacCready manages to shoot one of them out of the sky while Nora rains shotgun blasts down on the attackers. It’s all over but the ringing in his ears in minutes, with neither of them more than scratched by frag shrapnel.

He grins at her, high on their near-complete triumph. “Impressed yet?”

She hums thoughtfully, face set in a frown, before snorting. “Yeah. You’re caps well spent, Mac. Now let’s get on with it.”

Nora heads straight for the safe in the floor, wielding a screwdriver and bobby pin. "Watch my back, will you? I'm still pretty rusty at this, can't get anywhere unless I block out everything but the feel of the tumblers."

"Gotcha, boss." He's pretty sure they're in the clear, but the ruckus they raised could've attracted fellow scavengers. A quick scan of the street shows no visitors, so he looks back to check her progress. As expected, she's as slow with a lock as scouting out a route, but she doesn't snap a single bobby pin.

MacCready never had the touch with locks, and since Lucy did, he never bothered to learn. How many times did he stand watch, just like this, while she slowly worked on tumblers, feeling for that sweet spot? He could never get tired of the fierce concentration in her face, tip of her tongue wedged in her teeth, and the way her shirt would ruck up while she crouched, showing the line of her back, the top curve of her hips...

He clears his throat hard and puts his eyes back on the street, pushing the thoughts back, way back, into the lock box in the bottom of his brain, until he hears a whispered "Sweet!" and the clunk of a heavy latch falling open.

"Well, it's your lucky day," she says, handing him three clips and pocketing the rest of the junk (a hairbrush, two spoons, and a wooden block) the raiders had secured, probably while very stoned. "That uses .308, right? Help me with the bodies."

She doesn't mention payment for the ammo, and he sure as heck doesn't, either. She strips the raiders and their den to the bone. Even MacCready’s got to wrinkle his nose at the filthy long johns she stuffs in her pack, and you don’t get through a childhood in Little Lamplight without a solid tolerance for unwashed socks. It’s the old aluminium cans that move him to protest, “C’mon, leave it – you’d be lucky to get a cap for it!”

She only shakes her head and hands him a broken telephone to add to his pack.

They fall into a kind of routine, picking out the nearest raider hole, planning their attack (which usually sets him somewhere high and sheltered while she sneaks closer to draw them out, a strategy that would end his caps flow prematurely if she wasn’t so darn stealthy). Neither of them catch any damage that requires more than a stimpack and couple of stitches, always a win in his books.

It's almost a week before the boss's "Grognak of War" act wears thin and she lets him down big-style, at the cost of part of his ear. And he should've expected it; vaulties will usually walk a mile through mutie territory to avoid a single feral ghoul, in his experience. So it's half his fault when the first feral bedded down in cardboard next to the old library's marble steps raises its head and he doesn't immediately put a bullet in its sloshy brain. He tenses, expecting a laser to slice it through the eye, a shouted order pointing him to his position, a blur of barbarian leaping to her own chosen post.

But the feral's on its feet, wheezing a battle call to its comrades - and shoot, there's at least six others - and he's lost precious seconds waiting on Nora to do anything but fumble Little Shooty out of his holster and belatedly scramble to the open middle road, giving herself room to retreat without even a look at MacCready, let alone orders.

He drops his rifle - there's no time for that kinda finesse - and demands, "Boomer!"

She jumps as if she's forgotten him and yanks the shotgun from the harness under her pack. At least it's fully loaded, he notes sourly before the first two are on him and he can only pull the trigger, splattering glowing blood over his clothes. He doesn't have any more shotgun shells, he thinks just before letting himself pull the trigger again without really aiming, and the hesitation gives the other one time to swipe at his face. He ducks and rolls, landing hard on his shoulder, red blood mixing with the green on his jacket (later, when she's stitching and stimming the deep gouges in his temple, he thinks this is where that chunk of ear parted ways with him) and aims for legs. Tries to make each shell count, because once he's out, he'll have to run.

Behind him, he can hear in between the blasts of the big shotgun the smaller, almost genteel pops of Little Shooty. It's shockingly fast for a non-automatic piece, and he wishes suddenly he'd grabbed it instead of Boomer as he ratchets the shotgun between each shell.

They take down the ferals, yeah, and her tightly controlled shots actually land in fatal headshots for once, but it's a freaking mess. They both take more damage in a minute than they've picked up all week, and he's pretty sure one of her bullets winged the leather shoulder of his jacket. They haven't even come close to friendly fire before this.

For a long moment afterward, while he crawls to his feet and gingerly touches his bleeding face, she just stands there, eyes wild and showing white all around, before shaking it off with a full-body shudder. She holsters Little Shooty and brings Sparky's scope to her eye, scanning the rooftops around them.

"You scav," she says. "I'll watch your six."

"Yeah boss," he snaps, flicking the blood off his fingertips before stripping the first of what little valuables it carries, a couple caps and a wooden block. He looks up at a faint _whump whump whump_ noise in the distant sky which quickly grows deafening as a Vertibird rises past the library's roof and hovers above them.

It's his turn to freeze - there isn't a soul in the Capital Wasteland that wouldn't, knowing the Brotherhood's "Only Raiders Run" policy - but Nora only holsters Sparky and waves as a patrol rappels down, the one in power armour leaving a crater in the street.

"Initiate Nora," he says, saluting. "Excellent work. I intended to offer assistance, but it seems you've cleared the plaza."

MacCready snorts to himself. _Sure._ She _cleared it._

"Paladin." Nora returns the gesture. "Let's...take a walk. Mac, can you finish off here?"

He taps the bloody side of his face in a sloppy salute. "Yes, sir."

A wasted gesture; she's already turned away, head to head with the man in the tin can, speaking low. Before they're out of earshot, he hears her give those strange coordinates, this and that corner of such-and-such, the strange names she first tried to use directing him on to their next target.

The others spare him no greeting, only picking up the feral corpses after he's finished looting them and piling them up in a corner of the plaza, throwing a few old-world skeletons on top for good measure. One hefts a flamethrower, turning the pile into a bonfire.

MacCready sidles upwind, gingerly touching his face again. He's got a few stimpacks, but the cuts feel like they should be stitched first. He's not looking forward to jabbing at it by touch.

Cool air hits his sweaty hair as his hat disappears, and he swings his hand back to catch it, nearly smacking Nora in the face. She ducks, too quickly, the skin around her pursed lips white and bloodless. But she only says, quietly: "Let me do that."

It's not an apology, and neither is the jab of Med-X she gives his face before she starts or the jar of purified water she uses cleaning the numb scrapes, not the stim from her own bag afterward. Maybe 90 caps all together goes into keeping his face pretty, he estimates, almost two weeks' wages, but he can't feel grateful when her eyes are far away while she works, even when they're inches from his.

They both act like there's no patrol forming a defensive wedge behind them, no paladin lingering, clearly expecting her attention before they go, and their next days' walk is a darn quiet one.


	3. Chapter 3

All Nora’s fiddling with her Pip-Boy map somehow always leads to them staggering into a trading post just before their knees buckle under all the low-grade loot. He picks up her pattern quickly: trade for fusion cells if they’re in stock, then rad-away and rad-x, then stimpacks, then caps. She usually times it so they reach these safe spots just as the markets are closing, with night falling, and charms her way into a couple free mattresses so they don’t have to sleep in shifts out on the road.

Though he wonders how much charm is actually involved after a trader tries to charge them ten caps each, and she pointedly takes her time counting them out. Long enough for another trader to drift by, and for her to stop and ask after his leg, for him to shake her hand like he wants to carry off her arm for dinner, thanking her for rescuing him from those super mutants, and hey, what do you know, this guy’s happy to clear out of his squat for the night. In fact, he insists. No way the General’s paying for a place to stay in _his_ corner of the city.

They flip a cap for the narrow mattress, and she wins. He doesn’t mind; the armchair in the corner is probably dryer and almost as comfortable. When the locals have quieted down, he asks: "General?”

“Some folk call me that, yes,” she replies, and pointedly rolls to face the wall.

“This have anything to do with that Brotherhood patrol yesterday that knew your name?”

A patently fake snore is his only answer, so he lets it drop.

They leave early, detouring through the empty market stalls. When the lone guard looks away, she ducks, hissing at him to keep walking. Going one better, he waves down the guard and asks her advice on the best route north, nodding vigorously as she turns to point past the walls at raider and mutie nests to avoid. Nora joins them less than a minute into their discussion and asks the guard to pinpoint those nests on her Pip-Boy, saying with a slightly feral grin, “Just in case we get bored on our return.”

He holds it in until they’ve crept past the particularly dug-in mutants and cross the river. “No petty theft, huh?”

“Well, not from me!” she hisses back. “Or my friends. But that guy? That guy’s an ass. Twenty caps to borrow two mouldy mattresses for a night, not even under a roof? He’s the thief.”

“Got it, boss.” MacCready snorts. It’s not like he disagrees, but he can’t resist needling her. “So we’re updating the contract, then? No petty theft, except from jerks.”

They fall silent, sighting a small cluster of mirelurks near the river’s edge, and crouch behind the bridge’s rail. After the boss has taken her usual sweet time scoping out the ‘lurks and at least a half mile behind them, she turns to him with her head tilted questioningly. He scrunches his face, _well, yeah, of course we can take them!_ and jerks his head back the way they’ve came. They set up at the highest point of the bridge and, after a couple of potshots, the ‘lurks lumber into the water and swim directly toward them instead of backtracking to get on the bridge, just as he’d expected. The monsters’ vulnerable faces are hidden as they whirl in frustrated circles underneath them, but a Molotov cocktails opens up cracks in their shells, vulnerabilities he leisurely picks at while Nora sits back on her heels and watches out for any other scavengers attracted by the noise.

It’s a perfect plan, up until all three are dead and drifting downstream. 

“Dammit,” she says. “Could have gotten good caps for all that meat.”

MacCready sighs. Should have guessed she’d be too much of a Princess to literally wallow in the muck. “I’m on it, boss.”

He shucks off his pack, jacket, rifle, and after a moment’s hesitation, his boots, wiggling his shockingly pale toes against the dirty concrete. She doesn’t take them – big surprise – too busy digging in her own pack. But then she hands him a bottle of Rad-X.

“Here. I think you’ll need at least two, maybe three?”

He pops three and hands the bottle back, too surprised to twist the top back on first. “Uh, thanks Boss. So…I’ll aim to drag them down to that break in the concrete there, yeah?”

With two packs piled on her back and his clothes stuffed under her arm, she looks like Grognak when he raided Ali Baba’s treasure cave. He decides the wiser choice is not to point this out and jumps over the side before the boss can catch him snickering.

He hits the water badly. The drop was higher than expected but still not enough time to get his head down for a clean dive, and all he can think is _stupid, stupid_ as he plunges under sideways. Momentum carries him deep and he twists reflexively, losing his sense of up versus down. The nerves hit as he realises he didn’t even check the rest of the river for more ‘lurks downstream and he kicks toward what he thinks is the surface, cracking his head on a rock near the bottom and swallowing brown water when he reflexively breathes in to curse.

At that point, he gives up, goes limp, and hopes for the best. Rewarding him for his fatalism, the current carries him to the surface just as his vision’s going from sparkly to black, and he breaks through to glorious, blessed Commonwealth air not far from the mirelurk carcases. He looks back at the bridge, ready to wave to Nora that’s he’s ok, but she’s nowhere in sight.

_Probably creeping her way to the rendezvous point_ , he tells himself, coughing up foul water. _Like we planned._

He pushes the carcasses together and swims them in to the bank, where the boss is waiting, tucked behind the broken slab. Still gagging on the bad water, he lets her haul the bodies out of the water, bracing himself on the edge of the old balustrade. After a few moments, he hears her ask, “Mac?”

She leans over and firmly takes his elbow. “You need to get out of that water. Rad-X doesn’t last too long.”

He coughs again and lets her pull him up to the rough concrete, scraping his water-softened feet. He plonks down to the street and spits out another mouthful of muck.

Another long moment before she asks: “You ok to watch my back while I dress these?”

“Sure boss,” he replies hoarsely and picks up his rifle.

She hacks into them with a combat knife, stripping out the edible meat in rough hunks and wrapping them into those now-familiar leather bundles. “You ok, in general?” she asks as he coughs out the last of the river in his lungs.

“Fine,” he insists, and when she looks over her shoulder, touches the growing lump high on his forehead. He sums it up: “Hit a rock.”

She nods. “If you can walk about five blocks, I know a place.”

“I can, boss.” 

His damp feet squelch in the formerly dry boots and immediately start to itch, but that’s the worst peril they face in the silent walk to her safehouse, which turns out to the mid-block shell of an old bakery. She points at the counter next to the stove, telling him, “Sit there,” and leans back out the front door to set a frag mine, then close and brace it with the wreck of a chair.

He obeys, boosting himself onto the counter and immediately unlacing his boots. They're a dang fine pair of boots, and he isn’t going to swamp out the insides with river-wet feet.

“Wait,” she says, and opens a counter to reveal firewood, neatly chopped.

“Whose safehouse is this?” he asks.

“No idea,” she replies, “but this is the third time I’ve been here, and the supplies have never been touched.”

“Ominous,” he observes, and she hmms agreement, quietly filling the oven with kindling, stacked in the fussy pattern she seems to prefer, stuffing some old-world bills in the structure and lighting them with a flip lighter they took off a raider the night before. It catches quickly, at least, and he leans over when she flips the four burners open position to let the heat pour upwards.

There’s a metal grate in another cupboard, which she sets over the open burners. “You can put your boots there to dry,” she says, continuing after a pause. “And the rest of your wet clothes, if you’d like. There’s some leathers in mine, I think, that you could wear…”

He scoots closer to the heat. “Clothes’ll dry fine on me.”

“Sure,” she nods, too quickly, and he looks away.

There’s a clonk of metal unlatching and a hiss from her, and then her Pip-Boy is shoved in his hands. “Put this on.”

He stares at it stupidly. “What?”

“It’s got basic diagnostic capabilities,” she explains with a touch of impatience. “Sounds like you drank half the river, and I want to make sure that’s not a concussion.”

He takes it, gingerly. “I heard these things would blow your arm right off if you tried to remove them.”

She blinks and looks at her bare arm, the skin where it usually sits paler than the rest, with a small raw-looking puncture at the wrist. “Not so I’ve noticed. But I suppose that’d be a good tale to put out, if you owned one of these valuable little devices. Trust me, it doesn’t hurt. Well, it pinches a bit, where it sets into your vein, but you get used to it.”

He lets her clip it around his wrist, reluctantly, and yes, it does pinch like heck and beep alarmingly and the text scrolls past the screen too fast to ever hope to read, but she assures him it did the same when she put it on the first time. When the text settles, she wrenches his arm toward her and flicks through the dials.

“Hmmm,” she says, her face growing stiff and distant.

“What?” he demands, trying to pull his arm back and see for himself, but her grip is surprisingly firm.

“Oh,” she says, “Your head’s going to be fine. No concussion, no bleeding on the brain, just a bruise.”

_Of course_ , he thinks, insulted, _as if a little bump like that would slow me down_.

“It’s your rads,” she continues. “They’re pretty high. More than they should be, even after that swim.”

He shrugs. It’s been a couple months since he ran out of the medkit supplies he swiped on his clandestine exit from the Gunners, and not everyone carries a fancy clicker on their wrist to know when a rad storm is a mile off.

She’s quiet for a few minutes, not looking at him so much as through him, and he waits uneasily. Finally, she moves to her pack and digs another lunchbox out of the bottom, which she opens to reveal the sizable hoard of Rad-Away she’s traded for over the last couple weeks. She spends another minute staring at them before taking a deep breath and removing one, then, after another few heartbeats, two.

“You should let these drip slowly. Don’t squeeze the bags,” she tells him, setting yellowed surgical tubing into the first bag and then into an attachment in the Pip-Boy seemingly designed for it, “not unless you want to grace every bush between here and Sanctuary.”

She looks at the floor, not quite hiding a wry smile. “As I discovered the hard way, the first time I tried to clear out 350 rads all at once. Had to beat a molerat to death with a rolled-up copy of the Bugle, with my vault suit around my ankles.”

“Oh,” he replies at first, feeling his face heat up in a way that has nothing to do with the stove, and when the mental image really penetrates, he lets out a few shocked chuckles. “Yeah, well…you don’t have to warn me about the Rad-Away Runs. Trust me. We grew up on this fungus that flushed out rads, and, well, there was a back cave you just never went near unless you really had to.”

She does that painful looking snort-laugh again and looks him in the eyes as she takes one of their mirelurk bundles out and set two filets on the rack next to his boots. “Well, after such appetising repartee, I’m all for dinner. You?”

“Sure boss,” he replies, trying not to look as pleased as he feels. He’s finally getting warm through, the Rad-Away makes his arm tingle up to elbow, and he’s pretty sure her crude joke means she’s finally forgiven his, back in Goodneighbor. Not sure enough that he feels comfortable stripping down to his skivvies to properly dry his clothes, but nearly.

She straps on Little Shooty and puts her helmet back on. “Keep an eye on that, ok? I’m going to have a scout around the block to make sure we’ve no noisy neighbors for the night. Give me ten before you come looking.”

“Sure boss,” he says again, and drums his heels against the counter for the first couple minutes. By then, his boots are dry and the entertainment appeal of watching Rad-Away drip and meat sizzle has been exhausted, so he swivels the Pip-Boy knobs, trying to find the radio. An option marked “play holotape” looks promising, so he punches it up, wondering if he can beat her high score on Red Menace.

A man’s voice, loud and confident like Nora’s, booms through the room with a squeal of feedback. “Oops, haha, keep those little fingers away! Ah, there we go. Just say it, right there, right there, go ahead.”

A baby coos and burbles, and a feeling like icicles stabs through MacCready’s chest.

“Ah, yay!” The man laughs. Indulgent, proud, a little embarrassed. Fatherly. 

Those two hidden rings digging into the back of her neck.

“Hi honey, listen: I don't think Shaun and I need to tell you how great of a mother you are. But, we're going to anyway.”

He taps the screen, looking for an off button, while the man continues. “You are kind, and loving, and funny, that's right, and patient. So patient...patience of a saint, as your mother used to say. Look, with Shaun and us all being home together, it's been amazing but even so…” 

_There is is,_ he thinks, but his finger hovers over the stop button instead of touching it.

“I know our best days are yet to come. There will be changes sure, things we'll need to adjust to. I'll rejoin the civilian workforce, you'll shake the dust off your law degree. But everything we do, no matter how hard, we do it for our family. Now - ”

He punches the stop button, feeling crosshairs on the back of his neck, and twists another dial. "Butcher Pete" blasts from the speakers just as Nora opens the door, clutching an old folder and a pencil.

"Look what I found," she crows, dropping them on the counter before re-setting the mine and chair at the door.

"Great," he replies weakly, trying to breath in slowly like that was how he always did it. His stomach's settled somewhere around his ankles and trying to melt through his skin to the floor. _Family_ , he thinks, _and I haven't seen them. She hasn't mentioned them._

"You let dinner burn," she chides, flipping the raw side to the heat.

"Sorry," he says, "got distracted playing with this thing."

_They're not here. And not here doesn't mean they've gone to a nice farm up state. Not here means dead._

She shrugs. "It happens. I hear you found the radio, at least."

_Or maybe not. Sometimes "not here" means "away but safe". Safe as you can get them._

"Yeah," he agrees. "Same six tunes we've got in the south, 24 hours a day. Who'd want to hear anything else?"

"Well, me, for one," her half-smile, aimed at the stove, could cut him in half. "Looks like that bag's empty. You can hook in the second one now."

He obeys. Obeying is what he does.

She eats quickly and turns to the folder, tearing it at the fold, and writes on both halves. Thoughtfully, tapping the pencil on her lips, but not slowly. It's like that first afternoon in Goodneighbor, like she's put on the fancy suit again, but isn't looking down her nose this time. He grimly chews and swallows, watching her, as DJ Travis cycles through the usual songs, nervously reporting on the latest small Minutemen triumphs in between them.

Eventually, she passes both halves of the folder to his side of the counter. "Here. Read this through, and if you're satisfied with the terms, sign both copies."

He glances at the pages, catching a couple of statements in her neat handwriting, "room and board," "reasonable medical assistance and provisioning," "petty theft allowed as directed," and stares back at her in wordless befuddlement. _She's actually written out a contract. She...has actually...written out...a contract. On paper. Like it's good for anything but toilet paper before or after she writes on it._

Her smile fades as he stares, one hand suddenly flying up to cover her mouth. "Oh, shit. Unless you can't read. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm not sorry you can't read. If you can't. I'd certainly not look down on you, if so. It's amazing that anyone out here can at all, in fact, when just surviving takes all of a person's time. It's...we can have someone trustworthy read it to you before you sign, ok? I'm...shit."

He'd laugh, if the guilt wasn't still paralyzing all the moving parts in his torso. She hadn't looked this horrified facing down the feral ghouls.

"I can read a bit," he assures her. "Enough."

"Oh," she says. "Good. For you. I mean..." she rubs her forehead and sighs. "I'm sorry. I try, but, I'm not...not good at being a person, out here."

"No one is," he interrupts uneasily. He doesn't want her confession. They're already out of balance, and she doesn't even know it. He pointedly picks up the two pieces of the folder and starts puzzling his way through the longer words.

"It's more landmines," she continues, ignoring his discomfort. "Ones I have no training in disarming. Expectations I don't realise are no use out here until I've made an ass of myself and alienated potential allies."

He abandons the effort of reading and scrawls his name twice, the block letters ugly against her tidy sentences. She takes them and signs underneath, handing him one while she folds the other into quarters, and when she opens her mouth _again_ he blurts out:

“That holotape in this thing, I listened to part of it. Was looking for the radio, and then I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, but I did as soon as I saw how.” _Liar._ “Nearly as soon as I saw how.”

She closes her mouth and steps back, fingers tightening on the tough paper. "Oh."

"So, I'm sorry for that," he finishes awkwardly.

Silently, she turns away and takes her time sliding the new contract into a side pocket in her pack, one of the waterproof ones. When she stands, he sees she's wearing "the suit" again, and her face is set, her tone tight and formal.

"Thank you for telling me. I suppose the fact you'd confess to an accidental transgression which would otherwise have escaped detection indicates I wasn't unwise to put my trust in you."

"Yeah Boss," he replies. It seems like a safe response, and when she nods, he guesses he's out of the weeds, at least the thickest part of them. The pain in his chest starts to ease. They're still off balance, though, as she's got his confession, but he's got hers, and a chunk of her past. He fights back a sudden urge to tell her about Joseph's half-hearted schoolroom in Little Lamplight, and all those long hours in the dark when sometimes the strange, mild pleasure of puzzling through those Old World books beckoned. Give her something in trade.

He keeps his trap shut and gets busy checking the perimeter, bare feet slapping on the warmed old linoleum. He's relieved to find two mattresses rolled in a corner and shakes them out, setting them up at opposite ends of the room. The second Rad-Away's empty by then, and he unhooks the tubing, looking for the latch to take off her Pip-Boy.

"Mac," she says then. “Look, that holotape…”

He tenses. “Yeah?”

“Can you pop it out and stow it? I’ll leave it in Sanctuary when we get there.”

He taps likely-looking bumps on the top of the Pip-Boy until the tape ejects, and hesitates. “Put it in your pack, yeah?”

She shakes her head. “Yours.”

Mystified but obedient, he tucks it in the top flap, where he won’t pack anything heavy on the brittle old disk. He doesn’t expect her to continue, but she does, unlatching the Pip-boy from his wrist and resetting it on her own.

“I used to listen to it when I was sad. Until I couldn’t deny that it was keeping me sad.” She sits on the counter next to the boarded window and settles back to stare through the cracks. “I’ll take first watch. Good night.”

Half-drowned exhaustion or not, it takes him a while to fall asleep. Thinking about her family, again, the one they both know about now. _Dead_ , he concludes reluctantly, and wonders what the heck all their frantic scavving and selling is supposed to do about that.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FriedMayo, I swear I wrote this chapter before reading your awesome [On A Mission](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5334731). I too always wonder how the necessities would fit into these worlds...although the fact we both immediately lit on "MacCready would be super helpful about the whole thing" cracks me up.

It’s out in the countryside that they really get going. There, she shows him the true meaning of hoarding, with a dozen friendly settlements that accept her scrap with rapt smiles. She piles up the useful stuff, too, when there isn't a travelling merchant berthed, leaving trade instructions with the leaders and accepting handfuls of caps and the occasional fusion core.

"They all skim off the top," she tells him later on the road, when he asks how she can trust so many people. "The cost of doing business fast, I suppose. I'd make more caps per item hauling it into Diamond City myself, but move a small percentage of what we currently scav and carry."

"And meanwhile they're all wearing good leather armor," he points out.

She clears her throat. "I gave them that, actually."

"You sure you're aiming to make a lot of caps fast?" He frowns. "'Cause it sounds a lot more like you're running a charity for the laziest county in the wastes."

"What?" she squeaks, shaking her head. "If they've got their hands in the till already, and hiring all new staff would take too long, call it their wages and save on payroll."

"That's insane," he snorts. "You're just encouraging them to rip you off even more. And I'm breaking my back so they can live the high life?"

"At least this way, I'm only half ashamed to call them Minutemen. They can at minimum defend themselves now instead of crying to Preston and me every other day that a blowfly beat them all up."

"Minutemen?" he asks, halting in the middle of the street. "You're a Minuteman?"

She carries on without him. "Yes. More or less."

"And that's what all that 'General' crud's about?"

"More or less," she repeats, then, "Ferals under those cars up there. Might be some good scav in the checkpoint beyond them. You up for this?"

He stows the questions and unslings his rifle. "Always, boss."

* * *

MacCready could swear he'll need to let out his belt a notch any day now. He's never been this consistently full for this long. Out in the woods, the boss doesn't just put a bead on raiders but everything that moves. Their bags and bellies are stuffed with meat, radstag and dog and rat. She makes a half-decent stew with the tough wild carrots and tatoes they come across, but even she gives up on the bitterness of wild mutfruit. He stashes them anyway, knowing moonshiners will trade a few caps for them.

They've had a quiet day after raiding a small gang at dawn and then detouring wide around a Gunner stronghold, still a day's walk south of Sanctuary, when the boss pauses to rub her stomach, cursing quietly.

"You going on the rag, boss?" he asks. It's been three weeks of standing guard through each other's necessities, and he hasn't noticed any clouts rinsed out or drying over their fires, so they're probably due. "If you've still got that box of abraxo, I can scrub out and cut the long johns in my pack we picked up this morning."

She only stares at him like he's clubbed her over the head with Sparky, hand frozen low on her abdomen.

"No," she replies finally, pauses, and continues slowly. "Contraceptive shot. It has hormones that...actually, I'm not entirely clear on how it works...but the upshot is that I...we...don't have to be concerned with...that...for several months."

"Oh," he shrugs. "Good to know."

_Vault docs must have a heck of a lot of time on their hands to come up with a cure for that_.

"Thought those raiders’ mirelurk cakes this morning tasted off." She's blushing now, rubbing her stomach again, and only gets redder when it gives off an ominous gurgle. "Seems I have an unfortunate intestinal event in my near future. You?"

He shakes his head. "But I've got an iron stomach, boss." He jerks his chin to the east. "There's a cabin over that ridge a ways, one with an outhouse, if you can make it."

She sets her jaw. "I will make it."

He picks off the cabin's new inhabitants - a swarm of bloatflies - while she walks with stiff dignity to the rear, then sets up with his rifle far away enough to give her some privacy. Since she's being such a princess about it, and all.

She joins him not long after, busying herself with staring over every inch of the woods below them through her scope. He takes advantage of her embarrassed diligence to set his rifle aside and lie back on the ground, soaking up the warm late-day sun. "Want to camp in there for the night? There's no beds, but it's dry."

"Hmmm," she stalls before agreeing. "Probably best. I suspect it'll be a while before I can move on."

"I figured," he says, tilting his hat so it shades his eyes.

She hums again before responding with a touch of her erratic sense of humor, "Though we should probably leave a warning sign on the outhouse for the next travellers. Or maybe just burn it to the ground."

He snorts. "Bodies do what they do. When you're partnered up, you look after whatever you've got to. No point being precious about it."

A few more minutes pass before she speaks again. "So...before you, I travelled with a couple of other men. Is it safe to assume they also thought about my monthly visitor? Or speculated on the lack?"

He shrugs. "Probably."

"Possibly even kept some clean rags in their supplies, in case I needed them?"

"Probably," he repeats.

She sighs and mutters, "Well, this has been a mortifying afternoon."

He chuckles into his hat brim. "The way you talk, I can only see your vault full of men flopped over the railings with the vapors every second of the day, and all you women sneaking down the The Level Of Shame to blow off a fart in peace. No wonder you're so stealthy."

It's a while before she responds. "Not...quite. There was just more privacy. And, well, if you were in a relationship, or just didn't want the fuss every month, you went on the shot. So, why talk about it?"

He shakes his head, even if she can't see it underneath his tipped hat. "You make life on the outside sound bearable in comparison."

"Combat training," she interrupts him. "I worked for the military. Never saw a battle, of course, but I did go through basic, and had to keep certified even if I never tangled with anything tougher than a jammed desk drawer."

He lifts his hat to show her his raised eyebrow.

"Stealth training was part of that," she clarifies. "You mentioned it. Be right back."

He takes up his rifle again as she dashes back to the outhouse. While he waits, he looks back at the overpass they'd detoured around, thinking about how he's now holding a heck of a lot more pieces of her than she's got of him. The image of her creeping around darkened vault hallways with a team, faces grim with concentration as they pretend to step over landmines and pop off imaginary ammo into paper men, is strangely appealing.

"You got a minute?" he asks when she returns.

She rubs her stomach again. "Maybe ten of them. What's up?"

"Want to talk about a problem I've got."

"I...thought things were going well," she frowns. "Is this an issue we can fix?"

"No, I mean, not like that," he says quickly. He hasn't been really hungry in days, there's deep-pocketed combat greaves on his shins (fair enough, uncomfortably stuffed with pieces of a broken fishing rod), and she's given him more than his agreed minimum in caps the last two weeks. MacCready's a happy employee. "No. We're seeing eye to eye on nearly everything, and I hope that lasts. It's something personal."

"I'll help if I can, Mac."

"Ok," he nods. "I don't usually go sharing my life story, but you've been straight with me. So I'll be straight with you. We've been moving fast enough it hasn't come up, but those two assh- those two idiots from the Rail, Winlock and Barnes. They've been hounding me, driving off clients, and that's the folk who'll hire someone who worked with the Gunners to start with."

"Folk like me."

He tilts his head and answers diplomatically. "...brave folk. But the Gunners are always going to be better equipped, and they're all through the Commonwealth. I thought at first I could pull together the caps to buy them off, but...you heard how it went down. If that was ever an option, it's not any more."

Nora leans back on her elbows. "You think they could be talked around? A one-off payment's impossible, but maybe your 50 caps a week? I could give it a shot."

He shakes his head. "If they agreed, there's still nothing stopping them from putting a bullet in my skull. Heck, even if I set up a meeting, they'll just roll in with a dozen guys and wipe me out. Best case scenario, they just rip me off, and I'd be completely broke and on the run. Maybe you and me, though, we could pay them a little visit and end it before they know what's going on."

She holds up a finger and stands. "I'll get back to you."

The lowering sun cuts through his scope as he swings from west to south, checking the Mass Pike Interchange's defences as best he can make out from a half-mile away. He wonders if she's seen through him. He isn't lying, exactly...Barnes and Winlock aren't open to any deal that leaves him in the Commonwealth, but it's the caps he won't part with, even if they'd bite. But given the carry-n-cash job she's got him running, maybe she'd understand.

A tap on his shoulder makes him jump, his twitching finger nearly letting off a round. He whips his head around to catch her covering a smug smile.

"Stealth training," he gasps. "Yeah. I believed you."

"That's them?" she points.

"Yeah."

"I completely agreed when you suggested we should go around that, even when I thought it was just more raiders."

"A tough nut to crack, yeah, but the scav will be worth double any raiders we've hit. Triple, maybe."

"Stand down, soldier," she shakes her head, and he realises he's crouching on his toes, leaning forward with urgency. _So much for the poker face._ "All I meant was, I trust your judgement. Then, and now. You want my help, you've got it."

She stares at the overpass through her scope, giving him time to fumble out a response.

"Wow. I...I don't know what to say." _Smooth, MacCready_.

"Just tell me your plan. You've got to know the layout pretty well. Weaknesses?"

He scratches the back of his neck. "There's a lift that takes you right to the heart of the op, but as you'd expect, it's guarded top and bottom. If we cut to the south, there's a place we can climb on the highway and take the long way up, even get a level above them. Then, well, we've been doing pretty good with you drawing them out and me knocking them down. And we've got plenty of frag grenades from that last military checkpoint stash."

She shakes her head so firmly the laser rifle sways with it. "No. That's fine for the jet-addled idiots we've been targeting, but these are professionals. We can't expect stupid mistakes."

She sets the rifle aside and sits back, staring into the lowering sun with narrowed eyes while his stomach sinks.

"Looked like a lot of cars up there," she says.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Most of them mined, so they can retreat behind their barrier and light up the rest of interchange as a killing zone. I could spark those off easily enough, so long as you kept your distance."

She scrunches her nose and rubs her forehead. "Got that jar of purified?" she asked. "My head's killing me."

"How are the guts?" he asks, hoping to forestall her refusal to take the mission on after all.

She snorts and squeezes her eyes closed, but blindly points that rueful smile at him. "I think it's over now. A few hours' sleep, and I'll be fine. So in the morning..."

"Yeah?" he asks warily.

"I'll have a plan by then. Now, I've got half of one. Well, maybe a third. And, the one aspect I'm certain of..." She sits up to look him in the eye, already wincing. "I'm going to need all the caps I've paid you so far."

He barely hesitates before nodding. "Sure. Whatever you need."

"I'll return them to you, of course," she insists, laying a hand on his shoulder. That tight smile plays again around the corners of her mouth. "Assuming our heads aren't on pikes by noon."

"Doesn't matter," he says. The heat of her hand has somehow shot straight through the thick leather of his coat. He wonders if the runs have left her fevered. "Truth is, you're the first person I've met since I was a kid that I could rely on, didn't rip me off or stick a knife in my back. And, most of the time, I got a funny feeling you actually give a molerat's butt what happens to me."

"Mac..." she starts.

"So anything I got you can use here, boss, you take it. Whatever the plan, you point. I'll shoot."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every action scene I've ever written is meant to be read to the tune of "Yakety Sax".

Truthfully, he'd been happier with the theoretical plan when it sounded like it'd start after the crack of dawn, instead of two hours before. And when it didn't involve him clambering quiet as a prayer into the sky in pitch darkness with a pack of rattling grenades and a rope tied to the u-bend she'd ripped out of the cabin's old sink, slipping past the guard posts he used to man. Cold, sore, and scraped, he's still in place before light breaks, snuggled between two rigged-to-blow cars on the highway level over the main lift.

And it's a pretty sunrise, at least, smeary orange and pink all across the sky.

He's sure he's heard it a dozen times before he actually does, Nora's shrill whistle from the ridge. He doesn't move a muscle, though; it's aimed at the meatheads on the ground.

"This where I can find Winlock and Barnes?" she calls out.

One of the guards responds: "Who's asking?"

"A lady with a job needs doing."

MacCready nods to himself. Just the right note of impatience. Not high-handed, just someone used to getting on with negotiations.

"In any case," she continues, "I think they'll recognise the description you send up."

The guards confer below. "Are you seein...?" "Yeah, I'm seein, but I'm not believin." "She that vault chick Diamond City Radio keeps blabbing about?" "You think there's a surplus of women in the Commonwealth dolled up like Grognak?"

"Gentlemen?" Her voice is closer. Easily within their shooting range.

"What's the job?"

"I'll discuss that with the men in charge." After a moment, the lift starts up, and she shouts after it. "But you could be a dear and ask if they'd refuse Brotherhood work? No point in me coming up if my caps are no good here!"

Then an agonising ten minutes of small talk with the remaining guard. It sounds like Arlo, a walking slab of Brahmin that MacCready's pretty sure has never had a woman not paid for or crying.

"You from around here?"

"Uh, yeah, ma'am. Malden."

"How interesting - what part?"

"Vault 75, ma'am."

"What a coincidence - I'm from a vault, too, Vault 111! I've read that 75 is quite nice, very watertight."

"Well, mostly, ma'am. The bottom level's just rock, and the rising damp's terrible."

"Oh, 111's the same - you should see the radroaches we get swarming up in the spring. I suppose it's a common design flaw in rocky areas like the Commonwealth."

"I reckon you're right, ma'am. No help for it."

And on and on until MacCready could tear the ears from his head from the agonising combination of anxiety and boredom, until the blessed relief of a shout through the crack between his feet: "Bring her up, they want to talk!"

He gingerly places the first frag grenade in a narrow crack where it won't roll and creeps forward, carefully feeding out of his pack the fine fishing line tied to the pin. He risks popping his eyes above the carline to find the nearest guards, and is relieved to see they've drifted to the edges to watch their visitor. Their distraction lets him scuttle forward more quickly, setting a second grenade near another rigged car and tying a bunny loop in the fishing line through its pin. He holds his breath setting the third, moving too fast and pulling the line too hard, stretching his ears to hear how close she's gotten in the level below. She shouts "Good-bye, lovely to chat!" back to that brute Arlo, marking her as dead-centre in the killing zone.

"That's close enough, ma'am." 

_Winlock. Shi-oot._ The man has ears like a deathclaw. He'll have to be careful slipping past the guards to get to the space over the barricade, while setting the fishing line where it won't snag or accidentally pulling too hard and blowing himself through heaven's gates the easy way. He eases into the space between the closest car and the concrete barrier and slithers forward.

"My apologies, but I don't know whether you're Winlock or Barnes. We weren't properly introduced last time."

"Winlock, ma'am. Your friend MacCready isn't known for following any social niceties."

"Friendships on the outside certainly move fast if one conversation made us bosom pals."

"You're not working with him?"

"We had a chat, yes, and I did consider hiring him for this job, but he was...unimpressive. And given he seemed to have the, shall we say, somewhat uncertain employment status I gathered from your conversation, there was no point in wasting any more time on him."

His cheeks burn, and the distraction nearly costs him his head as he _almost_ impatiently yanks the fishing wire caught on a bumper, taking a slow breath just in time. _Yeah, she doesn't mean it, but plenty of others passed me over...maybe she's just quoting the word on the street in Goodneighbor._

"You said this was Brotherhood work? Why would they hire scum like him - or any mercs, for that matter?"

"How did I get on the payroll, you mean?"

"Sure, you could start there."

He hears the faint clink of thin metal - the dog tags she had hidden in the very bottom of her pack. "I joined up."

"Aren't you a Minuteman, 'General'?"

"I was. Who doesn't like a fancy title? But it sours quickly, standing as General over five soldiers, none of them fit for duty. I met a Paladin who felt I had the right stuff, and when I saw the armaments they handed out even to the Initiates, I couldn't sign on the dotted line fast enough."

MacCready can picture the fond pat she's giving Sparky, the same caress he gets every time she breaks him down for a good cleaning.

It's not far now, but there's a guard leaning exactly in the space he needs to cut through. He could try going around, but he'd have to pull the line around three sides of a car, and he doesn't think he can manage that without jiggling a grenade pin or two.

"Right, the Brotherhood's taking on fresh meat left, right, and centre in the Commonwealth. So I ask again, why do they need mercs when they've already got so many boots on the ground?"

"Possibly because they've got big plans that won't wait for all this 'fresh meat' to get trained into something useful? They want to make a splash, capture hearts and minds by clearing out the scum of the city, make the whole riverfront habitable for decent folk by spring. For that, they don't just need boots on the ground, they need local feet in those boots. Well trained, well armed local feet that know the streets, how to wipe out the hostiles but leave the buildings standing. And right this second, they've got - me. And I've got a squad soaking in a Rad-Away sauna as we speak because one of these new recruits got trigger-happy with the Fat Man she just begged to carry."

"Really."

"You been to the Starlight Drive-In lately? Might want to give it a miss, if you don't want to leave with a nice healthy glow."

"I heard that's Minuteman territory now."

"Last week, it was. This week, boom. Point is, now I've got permission and a little discretionary fund from my Paladin to give subcontracting a try, with the right kind of mercs. The sort of fine, healthy gentlemen and ladies our troops wouldn't be ashamed to fight beside. I've got one chance to prove myself, and the Gunners sound like my best shot."

MacCready starts to fidget. She's getting close to his cue.

"A 'little discretionary fund,' huh? How little?"

"700 caps." All his and hers pooled together, stuffed in a couple empty Rad-Away bags so they can clearly see how many as she holds them up. "For the first job: kill the beast in Swan's Pond. That goes well...we'll see how many zeroes I can add to that number on the next contract, unless you'd prefer to be paid in weapon upgrades, or maybe put a second arm and leg on the power suit?"

"If you're really Brotherhood, where's _your_ power armour?"

"As I'm sure you know, power armour - look, Barnes, is it? May I join you two over there? It's damned chilly out here in the wind, and I'm getting hoarse from yelling over it."

Silence. MacCready tenses, calculating: three fast steps to the guard, yanking the line, butt of his rifle to the head, and over the rail just before it all blows.

"Thank you." Nora's voice, lower and closer. He closes his eyes and concentrates on breathing in for a couple seconds. "As you may have noticed, I try to avoid layering up as late into the season as possible. Winter fashions are so unflattering to the generous figure."

He can hear that darn smile, that smug Super Duper Market housewife face she puts on, see the rueful twist that undercuts it. When he opens his eyes, he sees something even better: the guard in his way crossing to the other side of the overpass for a better view of her. He takes his chance and scuttles forward, jamming himself through a gap in the concrete of the upper-level barricade. Quietly, so quietly, he works the loops of rope off his shoulder, somehow without tangling them up in the straps of his back and rifle stock or banging the heavy metal hook on the ground. Nervously, he tugs on the rope; she'd snaked the end of the rope through the u-bend pipe and tied a bulky knot rather than securing it to one end, but he's still pretty sure this idea can't work outside of a comic book. He finds the final grenade in an outside pocket and grips the handle in his teeth.

"So it's fashion, then?" Barnes. There's a sneer in his voice, but genuine amusement too. MacCready wonders if there's anyone in Commonwealth, beyond himself, who hasn't fallen for her. Heck, he knows it's bull, and he still wants to believe her, say whatever it takes to keep her talking.

That throaty chuckle. "Sure. Fashion, and the fusion cores that armor gobbles up. I'm betting you didn't hop into that gear until my feet touched your pavement, am I right?"

A pause, then a deeper you-caught-me laugh, joined by her smug chuckle again. "Exactly. Even us Initiates have to ration our supply. And negotiating a contract is hardly charging into enemy territory. Which, gentlemen, I am reluctant to point out, brings us back to the point of my visit. Can we make a deal?"

Cue. He wraps the fishing line around his finger twice and yanks so hard the farthest grenade flips into the air and bounces off a car's hood.

"What's that?" one of the guards calls out.

_3..._ MacCready counts, and hooks the u-bend over the railing.

"What's that?" Winlock immediately echoes in a shout to the higher level. "Report!"

_2..._

Nora's voice, "Hey, don't look at me..."

Then, the thump of her heavy boots rapidly retreating, and Barnes' scream: "To arms!"

MacCready jumps, aiming high, legs snapping out as he hits the end of the rope's length and swings back underneath the highway. He tucks them back in tight and yanks the pin on the last grenade, flinging it behind him just before he tumbles across the broken concrete, hoping he's landed it in the cars and is rolling himself toward the barricades.

_1..._

The grenades up top blow first, triggering the mines, then the fizz left in all those 200-year-old atomic engines. He rolls into the solid wood of the barricade and scrambles up, leaving some skin on the pavement, and runs in lockstep with Barnes for a couple paces as they both dive for safety. He touches the brim of his hat just as Barnes realises who's come up next to him and dashes past the barricaded fort as a molotov cocktail files back over his head, exploding on all that so-flammable old wood.

And then his last grenade blows...and the nearest cars...and the ones behind them...

There's nothing in his ears but ringing, and he didn't look away from the searing blasts fast enough, now running all but blind in the shaded underpass. A solid body tackles him and he lands an elbow to the jaw, a hard knee up into the groin, before he gets hold of a goosebumped handful of bare skin and receives the hardest pinch-and-twist to the neck he's gotten since Lamplight.

He flings himself backward, arms out. "Sorry!" he whispers, or possibly shouts, but a hand covers his mouth, another goes around his waist, and he's dragged backwards just as the highway beneath them jumps and buckles.

Later, he'll put it together: old concrete and rusted rebar, government work to start with and already weakened by nuclear blasts and 200 years of neglect, plus massive explosions above and below...the top overpass crumbled. And all that heavy flaming rubble came down on the heat-weakened level below. Which also collapsed. And so on to the level below, probably, until their rolling dumpster fire finally came to an end on the heads of some deeply peeved molerats dug in halfway to China.

And he'll also have time to think how damn fortunate they were, catching most of the Gunners in their own killing zones (and the whites of her eyes will show again when he crows about what they must have felt on their group trip to hell, so he'll shut his trap so hard his teeth click together), but right now those stationed on the highway stretches closer to the ground are boiling up at them and they're fighting a kicked anthill in reverse.

And when they've put that problem down, there's still Winlock and Barnes. Of course those ba-idiots survived the blast and scrambled to safety. And, still deafened and assuming the heavy power-armour assisted footsteps are more concrete collapsing, MacCready doesn't even turn his head until Barnes has a shotgun against the back of his thigh and pulls the trigger.

He realises (again, much later...in the moment, there's nothing but long seconds of shocked agony) that the only reason he's got a leg left at all is that the concussions or heat must have damaged something essential in Barnes' favourite gun, and the misfire blows the big machine up in the man's hands. MacCready's blind flailing with the butt of his rifle at best puts the jerk out of his misery a little faster.

_Where there's Barnes..._ The urgent thought cuts through his fog of pain, and he rolls on his good leg, which - _fucking fuck bastard fuck!_ \- still hurts like he - hell, looking for Winlock. He can make out muzzle blasts in the gloom, recognises the rapid pattern of Little Shooty, and something huge moves between him and the bright strip of sky visible under the higher level. He swings the rifle to his shoulder and hesitates, watching the two ripples of movement his half-blind eyes can make out, pulling the trigger when he's sure it's aimed nowhere near the smaller one, the figure ducking and weaving and suddenly no longer making muzzle flashes.

He rubs his eyes, blinking hard and squints into the gloom. From what he can make out, Winlock doesn't even have a piece, just keeps lumbering after her swinging servo-assisted fists and shrugging off their bullets like tiny baby blowfly stings. MacCready aims for the un-helmeted head, but the high shoulders of the torso block his shots.

"Just run!" he screams at the boss (or thinks he does; not even his own gunshots cut through the ringing in his ears) but she keeps moving, making Winlock chase her a few steps at a time.

_She's trying to get me a clean shot, the dumb barbarian!_ he thinks and aims to slide one in. But Winlock's fist connects with her ribs, and she falters, and MacCready holds his breath and lines up one more shot that has to do it...

It goes wild, and Winlock grabs her arm and throws her like an unravelling baseball into the concrete barrier at the edge, nearly flinging her through a large hole in the bridge. MacCready's bullets ping uselessly off his armoured back as the idio- as the motherfucking bastard pulls back his steel foot and kicks her in the face.

_Height. Can get a shot past those high shoulders on my feet._ He jams the rifle down on the concrete and hauls himself up on it, wildly grabbing at a pillar almost out of reach to balance on his decent leg, barely feeling the fire in his other knee until he swings the stock right into it lifting his gun and nearly goes back down.

There's a bullet in the chamber already, which is damn good as he can't spare an arm to shoot the bolt. He braces the heavy rifle against his hip and lines one up right to the back of Winlock's head, and...

It misses, barely clipping Winlock's ear.

Which is enough, at least, to get his attention. Winlock turns, burned lips twisting and mouthing something undoubtedly original, like: "You, you thought you could defeat me, but you are the one defeated, ha ha ha!"

_Hell. He who lives by Grognak, dies like a comic book villian._

Winlock's moving slow, though, probably jellied by the blasts inside his tin can, and before he's taken two steps, Nora's made it to her hands and knees and crawled, not to him, but behind him.

Right in front of that big hole.

And the former mayor of Little Lamplight sure as he-heck doesn't need her significant glare to know he's got to drop the gun and hop as fast as he can, dropping his head to butt Winlock in the steel chest. When they're both leaning over the hole contemplating the head-first crater Winlock's made, after he's danced on one toe over the void, arms pinwheeling in thin air, MacCready silently swears to never doubt a Hubris Comic plot again.

She gives them both a jab of med-x and strips the metal shin guards from Barnes' power armour, and they strap them tightly, packed with bandages, around his ruined knee.

"Aw, boss..." he's pretty sure slips out when his eyesight's cleared a bit more and she stands up in the light, and she turns the broken three-quarters of her face away before hauling him to his feet and wrapping one arm around his waist. He does the same to her, more gently, remembering that punch to the ribs she took, and they carefully start the long hobble down the ramp. When they reach the first of their foes on the trip down, they pause, and without sharing a glance, she sets her feet and holds tighter, giving him the leverage to kick the body into rolling further down the long ramp.

Her nose is bust, certainly, smashed nearly flat. At least one of her cheekbones, too.

They stagger a little more as the med-x kicks in while the battle high drains off, and he puts some swagger into the next corpse kick.

With power armour, Winlock could have taken her head clean off. That was practically a love tap. And Barnes, Barnes could have put a large-calibre hole in MacCready's own head, but he aimed for the knee.

Another corpse down. This one catches some air as it bounces over a rough edge, and MacCready would laugh if he could get the breath in his lungs.

They meant to keep them alive for a while, him and Nora. Get some payback. Send a message to the Commonwealth. Their heads on pikes would have been the happiest possible ending.

They clamber over the break together to discover a massive pile-up not far from the bottom, a ghoulish tangle of bodies and broken cars, and it's too high. And really, he doesn't want to go near another car yet, and he figures she doesn't either, because they both decide to take a little rest at the same time and crumple into a tinier pile-up together.

_Yeah, well,_ he thinks, blinking against the too-bright clouds, _those idiots never stood a chance against us_.


	6. Chapter 6

Turns out, massive explosions draw a crowd, even in the middle of nowhere like the former Mass Pike Interchange. Fortunately, most of the crowd is Doc Weathers and his guards, who shoot the ferals drawn down from trailer park while he crouches over MacCready and Nora, muttering to himself, "Where to start, where to start?"

"Those bodies over there are ours," MacCready declares, "So no scavving. Hey...I can hear us?"

"Glad you've got a claim on all that fancy, _expensive_ gear they're wearing." Weathers waggles an empty stimpack over MacCready’s face. "It's already racked up quite a bill just stabilising you two so I can get the real work started. Can you keep still while we move you out of the sun? I burn easily."

"Yeah, we're camped in that cabin just over the ridge," MacCready directs, looking at Nora again. She's out cold, face a frozen waterfall of clotted blood. "You can help her?"

"If you've got the caps, I've got the magic." He gestures to his guards, who lift Nora at shoulders and feet while Weathers slides a stretcher under her, then carry her off over the barrier without a bump.

"You guys do this a lot, huh?"

Weathers lights a cigarette and gives MacCready the look of a man who can't be bothered to fill a mug with no bottom. A few minutes later, MacCready gets the same treatment; it would be peaceful, swinging between the two poles with the bright sky broken by swaying branches above him, if not for the stabbing throb of his shattered leg cutting through the med-x.

"There's still a chance I could save your friend, there," Weathers observes as they carry him past Winlock.

"I ain't paying for it," MacCready snaps.

"Hmmmm...." Weathers replies, then, "Fair enough, no one to spend the caps, no one to mourn. It's the natural law."

They settle him next to Nora, their blankets rolled out together to make a thicker pad on the bare cabin floor.

"Get his armour for me, though. I earned it, pushing him off the bridge."

"Well, friend, it'll be on my Brahmin at the end of the day one way or another, so let's call it payment for treatment, hmm? Right, who first?"

_Me,_ he wants to say, and almost does, but he bets the fix on her face is going to hurt like anything, and she's already down for the count. "The boss."

"Right-o," Weathers says, and pulls out two jabs of med-x.

"Hey, you trying to kill her?" MacCready protests. "She's already had one."

"Trust me, sonny, I'm a doctor," Weathers sooths. "I'll space them out, but you really don't want her waking up during this."

One of the guards settles at Nora's top, bracketing her head with her thighs and bracing her arms on Nora's shoulders. "Just in case she does," the guard explains. "It happens sometimes. She won't remember it, though."

MacCready tries to sit up. "Let me do that. She won't like it, finding a stranger over her."

Weathers shoves him down easily. "Hold her hand or something, if that keeps you busy. And stay out of my light."

The doctor stretches, his back cracking, and quickly sterilises his hands and few tools while the other guard washes the blood from Nora's face. "Not bad, not too bad."

"You're kidding, right?" MacCready says. Her face is so swollen it looks like a dropped plate of rotten meat no one cleaned up yet.

Weathers ignores him, twirling his scalpel like a fancy gunslinger before slicing into her skin too quickly to let MacCready look away, flipping a large flap up over her eyes. He hums while he works, slicing away damaged tissue, tapping bone fragments into order and flicking away those too broken to get into place. MacCready finds he now can't look away, mesmerised by the quick movements, the pinpricks of stim Weathers works gently into the areas he's satisfied with before moving onto the next inch of raw, bleeding flesh. Muscle and bone sluggishly re-grows as he watches, knitting together like vines climbing bricks. Eventually, Weathers flicks the big flap of skin back over the work, re-setting the edges bit by bit with the same neat pricks, not even bothering with threaded stitches to hold it together.

_The man's an artist,_ he thinks, then, taking another look at the joy in the doc's eyes, _A creepy artist._

"Right, on to the ribs," he declares happily. "Let go so we can get this chest plate off her."

MacCready drops the cold hand he doesn't remember taking and turns his head away, counting the seconds and listening to Weather’s muttered commentary. In exactly as long as it should take to stim and wrap up some broken ribs, the doc taps him on the forehead. "It's safe to look, now, loverboy. Your turn."

He checks, and yes, she's bandaged up tight from stomach to shoulders. Her face is still a wreck, but he thinks the nose and cheekbone are filling in all right underneath the dark swelling.

"I don't want to go under," he tells the doc. One of them has to keep watch, no matter how trustworthy the traders might seem. If he was a merchant doc, he'd probably figure all they had down to the clothes on their backs would just about cover the bill.

Weather sighs. "I can jab your leg with just enough to numb it and make you see pretty birdies. But you'll have to roll over and let Hilde sit on you to be sure you keep still."

_Awake but stoned off my butt isn't a much better option_ , he thinks, but nods, and rides out the distant sensation of the insides of his bones dancing together on a wave of nauseated wellbeing. Some drifty time afterward, the doc and his helpers hold up his scav, piece by piece, as they put it on the Brahmin outside the door and call out escalating numbers. After they've collected from every corpse that isn't a cinder, Weathers tells MacCready he's still 300 caps in the hole.

Relieved, he fishes the first Rad-Away bag from Nora's pack, removes 50 caps, and hands it over. That leaves him 400, his retainer and wages through the end of this week, and he lingers over the number in his mind the way he sometimes touches the soldier toy in the bottom of his pack.

"Shame," the doc says, holding up a fusion core. "I've been carrying this around expecting she'd take it off my hands. Guess I'll find someone else who has a use for the things."

They're almost out the door when he asks "How much?", and the answer doesn't surprise him.

_Just my luck_.

* * *

He sips at one of the bottles of purified the doc’s left them as the dizziness recedes and his stomach rolls unhappily, content to watch the light sneaking through the gaps in the wall move across the floor. He’ll wait until night to spark up the old fireplace, when the smoke won’t be spotted, when kneeling down to reach it won’t hurt so darn much. Set up straight in front of him on his pack, his leg still hurts, and he doesn’t want to try bending the knee yet, but it’s got the feeling it’ll heal true, just ache like heck when rain’s coming in.

The re-growing skin between his calf and his seat also itches like fire ants are mating on it, but he tries to keep his mind elsewhere. The boss’ face is a good distraction, moving through phases of healing on the double. He thinks the worst of the swelling will be over within a couple days, though she’ll be a rainbow of bruises for a while after.

It’s been a lifetime since he’s seen work this fine, maybe not since the angry vault lady got all those rib fragments out of Bumble’s lungs after the little girl tumbled down the back shaft. She’d worked security back in the vault, she told MacCready in between snapping at him to hold that goddamned flashlight higher, but her dad had taught her the basics. He’d asked why her dad never taught her how to fix her ugly mungo butt-face, expecting her to elaborate, but for some reason she let the subject drop.

He scoots close as soon as Nora starts to move, carefully lifting her head and shoving the bottle to her lips.

“You should drink,” he orders, and she does, wincing, dribbling from both corners of her mouth. She resists weakly when he tries to force more between her lips, so he reluctantly sets it aside and fluffs up the blood-streaked blankets a little before setting her head back down.

“You’ll need to drink, and eat soon too, if you don’t want to get stim-sick,” he says. All that rapid healing will be hollowing her out, and without resources to burn, she’ll just get weaker, heart slowing as it struggles to beat blood through all that robust new bone and meat. “We paid too darn much for all those drugs to let them kill you.”

Her eyelids flicker, and she raises a trembling hand like it’s twenty pounds of concrete to touch her face. He smacks it away. She just tries again, so he holds it down by her side.

“Knock that off. It’s healing.”

Her mouth twists, and she croaks: “…hurts.”

“Well, yeah,” he says. “You got kicked in the face by a garbage can with a grudge. It’s gonna hurt.”

A tear trickles out of one eye and, as he watches, dribbles into her ear. “…bad?”

“Oh, hey, no,” he hurries to backtrack. “It’s not like that. You’re still pretty, boss. Don’t you worry.”

“Hurts,” she croaks again, then: “…scary?”

“What?” he asks, squeezing her hand like that might force some sense out of her.

She coughs. “…scare Shaun?”

“What?” he asks again, an octave higher. He tries to remember if she’s mentioned any enemies in the area, any named Shaun. The name rings a bell, but he doesn’t place it until she forces her eyes open and, gaze drifting, grinds out a full sentence.

“Will…will it scare children? This damage?”

_Children. Shaun._ Her _Shaun. He – heck. She must still be looped on the med-x, worried a dead kid won’t recognise her._

“No, boss, no.” He squeezes her hand harder, and she grimaces, tries to pull it away. “Sorry. Look, don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be fine.”

She shakes her head weakly, pressing her lips together, so he moves fast. In desperation, he decides to give honesty a try.

"Boss, right now, that mug would make a reaver pee his rags. Heck, if I had two good knees, I'd be crawling away myself." Her eyes focus a little tighter, finding his face. "But tomorrow or the day after, the swelling's gonna go down, and in a couple weeks, even the bruises will be gone, and you'll be terrifying raiders with the same old face. I watched the doc do his thing. It was gross, but he did darn good work."

The bloodshot slits of her eyes squint at him for a long time before she clears her throat. “How’s the leg?”

“Still attached,” he shrugs. “Can you sit up?”

She can, and she does, and after an hour of MacCready’s constant nagging, she’s gotten the rest of the water into her. He starts the fire even though it’s barely sunset, gingerly balancing on his good knee, and blows the worst of the dirt out of a cooking pot he finds in the corner. Everything remotely edible they’ve got left, he hacks to bits with her combat knife and throws in, sloshing their last beer on top of it.

“That’s going to be…interesting,” Nora observes.

“You don’t cook, you don’t complain,” he replies automatically, citing one of Little Lamplight’s only iron-clad laws.

She mockingly raises trembling hands in defence. “I was saving that beer, is all.”

“Yes,” he imitates her tone, “You were saving it for this delicious stew. Which you will eat half of. _And_ compliment the cook.”

“All hail the cook,” she replies and snorts, then whimpers. “Ow. My nose.”

“We’re broke, by the way,” he tells her. “Doc cleaned us out, and what he didn’t take from the Gunners is too burned to sell.”

“Oh,” is all she has to say.

He stirs with the broken spoon so vigorously some of the broth splashes over, sizzling in the fire. “Sorry. I really thought this would be a solid payday.”

When the quiet gets too heavy, he looks back at her, and she shrugs. “You win some, you lose some. We’ll get them next time.”

Relieved, he tells her, “Have a look in my pack.”

She’s quiet again when he looks back, turning the fusion core over in her hands. “You collect those, right? Doc Weathers saved it for you.”

“Thank you,” she replies finally, then: “I owe you.”

“Sure.” He wraps the ends of his sleeves around the scorching pot handles and carries it over to where she sits, handing her the spoon first. “No rush.”

* * *

It’s a few days before they move on, before he can walk like his leg isn’t a newborn radstag and she sees the same view in both eyes. They’re both relieved to clear out, but she makes the excuse: “Back there, I felt like we were trying to defend a swiss-cheese teepee.”

And she’s right (he assumes from her tone, as the last three words are brand-new to him). They’re dang lucky no enterprising raiders came sniffing around, drawn to the still-smoking wreckage of the former Interchange, just a swarm of radroaches when he decides to poke at the pile of scrap behind the outhouse. She’s out of ammo for Sparky and Little Shooty, consigning them both to the bottom of her pack with a sad pat, and their medical supplies begin and end with a nice-sized puddle of Rad-Away. 

(“We can restock in Sanctuary,” she keeps assuring him, until he starts amusing himself with purely mental mockery of the fabled Sanctuary. _There’ll be streets of gold in Sanctuary! There’ll be a lake of whiskey in Sanctuary! There’ll be puppies and rainbows in Sanctuary, and on alternate Tuesdays, the fun of joining the lottery to pick who gets slaughtered to feed the rest for another week!_ )

Truth is, neither of them is any good at sitting still, and the Gunner job’s been preying on him. He doesn’t know what to say to her, but he’s dying to spit it out, and she’s probably itching from those crosshairs on her neck. Mostly, she pokes at her face whenever she thinks he isn’t looking and he snaps at her to leave off it until she snaps back _who’s the boss here anyway_ , and he snatches his rifle and walks out in tight circles around the cabin, half-scanning for threats, half stretching out his new muscles and tendons so they grow back right, and neither of them apologise when he comes back in.

So yeah, he figures they’re both pretty happy to see the back of that swiss-cheese teepee when they go, inching east until they hit the main road, then creeping north like two old ladies. It galls, detouring around raider encampments they could take in their sleep, but she’s rattled and raw and has the smell of home in her nose. When they camp, she lets him sleep the night through, and he lets her let him, waking to find her still leaning on the same tree she was at midnight, tight face pointed north.

It doesn’t help his mood at all that one pantleg’s shredded all up the back now, and it’s getting cold, and the boss keeps insisting he take point. And every time he looks back quickly, her face is bland and blameless as the merciless blue sky above.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those curious about the medical facts here: Fallout medicine is magic. Stimpacks are magic regenerate-y goo that's also antibiotic and in this case a coagulant. Med-x is magical morphine that knows whether it's time to chase the sparkle birds or go under for serious surgery. Jet is a totally bitchin high and also adrenaline and also sometimes a rescue inhaler. Psycho...I don't know. I'm saving that one for the next corner I write myself into and need airlifted out. Maaaaaaagic.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sanctuary does not so much live up to its name.

They take a break late in the day by a fortified Red Rocket station manned by three old men. She greets them by name, which one of them returns with a taciturn nod and another by silently handing her two Nuka-Colas. The last just glares and shuffles back into the garage.

“They don’t talk much, and when they do, I think it’s more French than English,” she tells him, “but you should see what they can do with a pile of scrap.”

He peeks through the barricades to see a jumble of improvised beds, chairs, pipe sections, even a few stoves that look half functional.

“I don’t know where they came from,” she continues, “but they sure as hell don’t want to go back. So we gave them this little settlement, and they spin our hay into gold.”

She’s lost him again, as usual, but the introduction leads him down a chain of thoughts to belatedly realising that they’re nearly home, to her home, anyway. Where she’ll be surrounded by people not him, people she’ll have to be the General to, who’ll probably need to report and get orders and he won’t get a minute without an audience until they leave, when, chances are, his nerve and good intentions will be in the wind.

“Look, boss…I got to talk to you about that Gunner hit.”

She winces, touches her still-bruised face (although the long scar where the doc cut across her skin is a thin line already, shrinking a little more every day), and starts to shake her head.

“Please, boss,” he insists. “Thing is, I like to keep it nice and even, no one owing anyone anything. And you’re one up on me, a big one up. We took out that waystation, and practically every Gunner who knew my name, and you didn’t make a cap from it.”

_And we both barely got out with all our parts in shape to stitch back together_ , he doesn’t add.

“So I don’t want you to pay me back any of the caps for that fusion core. Our deal still stands…you point and I’ll shoot as long as we’re both walking these roads…but this squares us.”

She sets her empty bottle on the fence and jerks her head toward the road. He falls into step next to her, letting the quiet stretch.

“I want to be the good person who turns you down,” she says. “But, truth be told, I want your 400 caps more.”

MacCready huffs out a quiet chuckle. “So soothe your conscience and buy me a drink outta that whiskey lake you’ve got in Sanctuary.”

He grimaces to himself. _That is_ not _a joke we share…shoot._

But she only snickers a little in return. “Cait was building a still when I left. Maybe I can spring for a snort of moonshine.”

“Deal,” he says, and he picks up speed, feeling lighter despite the lingering stab of regret in his wallet. She matches his pace, probably eager to reach the fabled lands, and it’s better than it’s been since he pointed out that overpass looming behind them.

She still makes him walk in front of her, even though there’s no threats for him to take care of worse than a pack of mutts that whuff and wheel back into the woods.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she tells him quietly, as they top the hillcrest leading to a wide bridge. “The road’s a damn lonely place until you have someone to share it with.”

She trots forward, whistling and waving Boomer over her head to catch the attention of the guards posted at the main gate, saving him the trouble of figuring out how the hell to respond to that. There’s shouting, and more whistles, and more shouting, and then there’s a little crowd raggedly cheering (with some friendly obscene jeers mixed in) gathered to block their way before they’ve even crossed the bridge. A man dressed like Hancock’s best costume buddy pushes his way through and steps forward, touching the brim of his hat.

Nora jams Boomer carelessly in the in the straps of her pack and hurries forward, empty hands rising, but the man sets his feet square and crosses his arms. She abruptly slows and loops her thumbs in the belt of her Grognak skirt, giving the man a curt nod.

“Preston.”

“General.”

MacCready shifts so he’s standing just behind her shoulder, focusing his gaze on the crowd, assessing for threats. It keeps him from pinging his eyes between the boss and the man in the fancy hat looking for clues as to exactly what the heck happened to her happy homecoming.

_That’s definitely_ not _the voice of the man on the holotape_ , he thinks, not sure why he even compared the two.

“MacCready,” she says, and he perks his ears up, but she’s only nodding toward him, and a few hands raise in greeting, settlers introducing themselves all at once so he doesn’t catch a single name.

“Uh, hi,” he says, and almost gives a nervous wave, shifting the movement to scratch his chin instead.

The boss is pushing her way through the crowd in a flutter of shoulder pats and snatches of one-sided conversation. The new purifier’s up. Sturges got the big generator fixed. They moved the latrines downwind. They had molerats. They had radroaches. They had muties. A vertibird landed right in the middle of the street! Strong ate a raider and left the bones in his roommate’s bed. Cait started a fistfight with the McGinty family again. Nick got a call about a missing kid and went back to Diamond City. The traders want another watering trough for the brahmins and their own bunkhouse or they won’t come any more.

Her smiles gets tighter, and she nods and nods and nods. MacCready sticks to her side, stumbling over all the feet suddenly under his, straining his neck trying to take it all in. Sanctuary’s at least as big as Diamond City market, old world houses and new world shacks strung along a mostly paved road, crops haphazardly sown in the old lawns, cookfires blazing during daylight, worktables covered in scrap set up in the old garages. Defensible as heck, too…the wide creek they crossed looked like it curved around most of the settlement, which is tightly walled all around, with regular guard towers and turrets. There’s windmills in the street, wires running to the houses, to streetlights, all along the inner defences.

If it only had a nice thick roof, preferably at least twenty feet of rock and dirt, MacCready would curl up in a guard post and never leave…well, for at least a week or so.

Nora replies in clipped sentences, mostly polite variations on “Work it out yourself,” and drops her pack by the door of the closest house. Preston watches her field reports for a good ten minutes before he steps forward and tells the settlers to get back to work, that the General will be available at dinnertime to catch up. After they’ve cleared out, he jerks his chin toward her face.

“What happened?”

“Long story,” she shakes her head. “Later.”

“Food or rest?” he asks. MacCready shifts on his feet, still clutching his rifle in both hands and hopes she declares it’s time for both.

“I’ve been wearing the same clothes for a month,” she says instead. “They’re covered in blood and filth and more nights of the med-x sweats than Vera Keyes would call de rigueur. Before anything else, I want my own stink out of my nose.”

She smells pretty normal to MacCready, but Preston nods as if he agrees. “I’ll meet you there.”

Nora half-slinks back through the gate, as if she’s sneaking up on a raider den rather than out of her own settlement. MacCready follows as she walks around the outer walls, past the chugging purifier set out in the water with its own little generator. Even in the dry grass, his steps must barely make a noise, because she jumps when she turns to find him shadowing her.

“Oh! Mac…I should have said. I don’t need a bodyguard here, so you can take a break. Go eat, ask around for Cait if you want to try some of that moonshine, whatever you want. Have a look in the armoury, certainly, for some new clothes and ammo.”

He hesitates, and she gives him that rare untwisted half-smile. “Time off doesn’t come out of your pay, you know. It was in the contract.”

“That’s fine, boss,” he assures her. “It’s just…that’s a _lot_ of people in there. I maybe need a minute?”

“You’re not the only one,” she sighs. “When I’m away, I want to come back, but when I come back, I want the quiet again.”

She looks past his shoulder, and MacCready turns to see Preston approach with a bundled blanket over his shoulder next to his laser musket, which he lays out on the grass to reveal treasures of Rad-X, abraxo, soap, and a pink dress.

“Mac, can you keep a watch to the east?”

He turns back to nod at her and immediately whips his head in the assigned direction, turning his back on the spectacle of her lifting the bikini top over her head, revealing a grime-caked bra underneath, shivering in the chill wind. He takes a peek at Preston – the long way, his eyes travelling past the barricade walls – to see the other man with his weapon up, scanning the treeline beyond her. Moments later, he hears the scrub and fizz of abraxo and the slap of leather on rock: laundry. The rhythm’s a little hypnotic to his tired brain, easing the tension out of his shoulders as he almost lazily watches a couple of bloatflies down the creek through his scope.

“Preston,” she eventually breaks the silence, “I can’t stand it. I need a wash.”

“Fine, General.”

MacCready jumps as Preston lets loose a shrill whistle and shouts up to the nearest guard tower: “General’s taking a bath!”

“General’s taking a bath!” they echo, shouting into the encampment. “Battle stations!”

Behind him, the boss sighs again.

“Battle stations?” MacCready asks Preston, getting irritated. “That some kinda code for ‘come get a peek at your leader’s goods’?”

A snort now from the direction of the water, followed by splashy footsteps as she wades in.

“Every time the General takes a bath, we get attacked,” Preston tells him.

“Only twice!” the boss argues. “You need at least three similar incidents before it may be considered a pattern. And the first time, it was just a pack of dogs.”

“The second, it was raiders,” Preston reminds her. “And you joined the defensive line completely naked.”

“Not completely!” the boss protests, then mutters. “I pulled my boots on.”

MacCready notices Preston’s smug glare about the same second he realises his mouth is hanging open, and whips his head back around to his scope. The bloatflies still haven’t detected their presence downstream. He focuses on their movements with intense concentration, just in case that changes.

“MacCready, is it?”

He nods tightly, not turning his gaze to the other man.

“Seems like you’ve been taking good care of our General. You have our thanks for that.”

MacCready nods again, tensing up all over as he feels the man jiggling a screwdriver in the lock that is his brain.

“The things you’ve been through together…” Preston continues. “I know you’re not a Minuteman, but if you would care to make a report on any Commonwealth changes throughout that duration, I’d consider it a personal favour.”

“Mostly raiders,” MacCready shrugs, keeping his voice low and light. If there’s one thing he’s learned from the boss in the last month, it’s that you can hide a lot under a thin blanket of truth. Can wrap it up in a nice noose to draw more out of your interrogator, too. “Started in Goodneighbor, worked our way down the river, ran a circuit of the settlements to the north. It’s pretty quiet to the west and far south of here, now.”

“No muties?” Preston pushes. “No ferals, or synths?”

MacCready shrugs. “Only those in our path we couldn’t avoid.”

“You have something to say to me, Preston?” the boss calls, and her voice is colder than the wind working up the bare back of his leg. “I’d recommend you follow the chain of command, if you do.”

“You’re asking for my report right now, General?” Preston replies, drawing himself up straight. “Fine. The settlements’ amenities are overall improved. We can cover specifics on your inspection. New settlers: nine. A family down from the north, three children.”

“Children?” the boss breaks in. “We’re going to need a schoolhouse sooner than planned.”

“I’ve already put the word out among the traders we’re looking to hire a teacher, General.” Preston chides. MacCready squints harder into his scope. “We’ve also repelled several raider incursions with no casualties, and one serious mutant attack which resulted in a number of severe injuries.”

“How’d Strong do?” the boss interrupts again.

“Actually…very well, General,” Preston replies. “I can report that you were correct. Despite his constant threats to consume his fellow settlers, his violent tendencies have been confined to attackers. And…he does bring in a lot of fresh game for the community pot, even if this meat must be inspected carefully before cooking.”

MacCready shoots Preston a curious look over his shoulder, but the other man ignores him.

“There was another incident during this attack, however…” he continues doggedly. “We received unexpected backup.”

“Oh, really?” the boss asks.

“Unwanted backup,” Preston clarifies.

“Oh,” the boss repeats, tone chilly again. “Really.”

“A vertibird landed right in the middle of my goddamn town, General.”

“I suppose they were useful, at least?”

“Right in the street, General. Flew right in like they own the place, spitting orders to _my_ troops.”

“Did anyone obey?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, there you are.”

“Where am I, General? Sitting in a Brotherhood outpost?” Preston’s spitting the words out now. “Danse came looking for you. Wanting a report on your assignments, since you haven’t checked in this week. As I suppose you do every week, General?”

The boss doesn’t respond.

“And I can tell you, they weren’t happy to see Strong, or your old Vault-Tek friend, or that half-skinjob Nick Valentine. We were moments away from a second shoot-out, General, if Danse hadn’t threatened half his squad with ‘bilge duty’, whatever that is, and taken off. I’m 100-percent sure he intended to sit right here waiting on your return.”

“Danse isn’t so bad,” the boss insists. “He’s salvageable. Not as brainwashed as the rest of them, just so traumatised by a Capital Wasteland childhood that any alternative seems better.”

_Danse?_ MacCready tries to place the name, thinking, _Maybe Rivet City?_ But he’d always given the Brotherhood a wide berth, even back in the good days. He’s met Nick Valentine, at least, even if he can’t picture what the heck would have drawn him this far out of Diamond City.

“Glad as I am you’ve enjoyed your heart-to-hearts with him, holding hands in the sunset,” Preston snaps, “he’s Brotherhood. They were only in the area because they’ve taken Abernathy Farm, General. They cleaned out their harvest, took most of their supply of purified water.”

There’s a hard splash behind him, and MacCready automatically turns to make sure the boss is ok, then snaps his head back around to stare at the bloatflies again. No good, the image is burned in his retinas like a cheesecake Grognak cover: the boss with legs set square, hands in fists at her sides, back ramrod straight, wet hair halfway down her back, fierce anger blazing from her bruised face. She’s still got the underwear and bra on, and really it’s not much more skin than he’s seen every day for the last month, but they’re soaked through and dripping suds.

“They didn’t take Abernathy, Preston,” she declares. “For the record, Nick and I did, on our own, from that pack of raiders in the satellite dishes. And I was the one who ordered them to let the Brotherhood commandeer their harvest. Them _and_ Hilltop, _and_ County Crossing.”

“Who’s side are you on?” Preston snarls.

“Our people's. If they didn’t give over that food voluntarily, the Brotherhood would have killed half of them and cowed the rest into virtual slavery. This way, they’re alive and defended by two armies. And you know as well as I do, the Brotherhood won’t touch food that comes from the Slog, fearing dirty ghoul cooties, and they won’t touch Sanctuary, either. Our supplies can stretch to feed the others.”

“Your priorities are all out of order, General, if you think – ”

“General? You keep calling me that, Preston. What’s a general’s job, huh? Is it only to fight and burn and blast until there’s nothing left to fight over and no one to push the button?”

Water droplets hit the back of MacCready’s head.

“Or is a General supposed to end wars and fight to keep the peace?”

“We’ll have peace once the Commonwealth is united behind us and – ”

“Even if we manage it, Preston, how long will it last? Could you and me hold it together? And then hold off any outsiders that roll up to our door with better equipment and a worldview only extending to anyone else inside a power helmet?”

“General…”

“This is peace, Preston, groups that hate each other resenting the ground they’re giving, instead of shooting to take it. You resent them taking our people’s food. Brotherhood resents that they can’t just occupy all our settlements, because a war with the Minutemen might not break them, but it’ll certainly turn the locals against them. And I’m resentful as hell I regularly have to split a bottle of bourbon with that revolting child and smile while he looks down my shirt and waxes nostalgic about the good old genocides back home. That’s peace, Preston, and you’re not taking it away from everyone who depends on us.”

MacCready risks a look back, not that he’s sure either of them remembers he exists. Their mutual lock-jawed glare could boil the water between them, nostrils flapping, chests heaving. He can’t help but notice a few things. One is that the boss is wearing “the suit” again, but it seems to have sprouted power armour plates. Another is that half the settlement has silently gathered at the top of the barricade, some of them starting guiltily as they see him catch them there.

And the last is that Preston’s looking her right in the face, not even a twitch down at the body holding it up, which means he either respects her a heck of a lot as his commanding officer…

_Or he’s had his fill of looking it over already._

MacCready latches on to what’s somehow the strangest part of her speech, and asks: “You get a kid drunk, boss?”

She jumps a little and flushes when she sees not only his attention on her, but the audience on the walls.

“Get back to work!” she shouts in a parade-ground bellow that melts the crowd like spring snow, and turns her back, fussily gathering up her hair and squeezing out water.

“Maxson isn’t really a child,” she tells MacCready. “He’s probably around your age. It’s that creepy spoiled prince attitude …”

She shudders, then sighs when Preston persists: “General…”

“What?” she replies, snapping off the word like tough piece of jerky.

“By your logic, wouldn’t bolstering the Minutemen’s strength only make the Brotherhood pull back further? Support your peace?”

“Sure,” she barks. “Why not?” 

“So why do you refuse to help me take back the Castle? Would this make us too much of a credible threat to your close pals?”

“I didn’t refuse, Preston, I said not right…” She trails off and holds her hands up to her face like she’s praying into them, taking a couple of deep breaths and continuing quietly, almost in a whisper. “Do you want to take the Castle, Preston? You want me to get loaded for bear and cross the Commonwealth and do this right now, just for you, as a personal favour?”

“You need to do it for the Minutemen, General, and for the Commonwealth. We’re running out of time.”

“Preston…fine. We leave tomorrow. Will this make you happy?”

“Retaking the Castle should make all the Minutemen happy. Especially their General.”

MacCready lifts his rifle and sights on the oblivious blowflies, impulsively taking them both down with two clean shots.

“What – ” Preston starts.

MacCready looks back to see him squinting into the distance, shading his eyes with one hand. There’s a touch of a smile on his lips when he looks back at the boss. “That’s three times, General. It's official.”

“Go to hell, Preston.” But her voice is softer, warmer, than it’s been since she stepped through Sanctuary’s gate.

MacCready slings his rifle and heads toward the barricade, calling back, “Taking a break, boss.”

If either replies, he doesn’t hear it.


	8. Chapter 8

A couple of hours later, there’s a coffee mug of bracingly fresh moonshine in one hand, while his other is cramped from hearty handshakes. Nearly everyone’s so glad to meet a new recruit that he gives up correcting them on his actual independence. Most immediately offer him a tour, a spare corner he can put his bedroll in, a bowl of soup. One of the new kids, a frowsy-haired toddler, attaches herself to his shin, and he smiles at the beaming idiots who might be her parents like she hasn’t just bitten his heart out and chewed it up in front of him.

_And I thought the Gunners were a cult._

He’s settled in a stand of mutfruit trees with the malcontents, Jun (and his Commonwealth-renowned thousand-yard stare), Cait (who’s told him twice that the next person to check out her ass will taste her fist of fury, and asked three times if he’s carrying any psycho), and Marcy (who whines that it’s bullshit she has to share her house with a bunch of new meat who didn’t build it; neither did she, but at least she was there first).

“And there’s rainbows and puppies in Sanctuary, and every week the lottery to pick who we’re gonna eat!” he sings tunelessly, and Cait rolls between two trees hooting laughter.

Marci nods. “That’s a really good idea.”

MacCready laughs and claps her on the shoulder.

“I’d probably get picked the first week,” Jun tells the bottom of his mug.

“You’re too stringy,” Marci reassures him. “Be a waste of time butchering you.”

MacCready stretches his legs out in the grass, rubbing his reconstructed knee. It feels like a storms’ coming on. He’s not drunk, despite two mugs of Cait’s paint stripper, but he’s closer to seeing Sanctuary through the boss’s eyes.

“Ladies and Jun,” he drains his mug and returns it to the rack under Cait’s still, “it’s been interesting, but I gotta see an armoury about a pair of pants with two legs.”

He follows his nose to the latrines, then asks the ghoul who’d introduced himself as “Mr Vault-Tek” ( _weirdo_ ) for directions (“Just look for the best-defended house, sonny, you can’t miss it!”). On his way, he tips his hat to the settlement’s pet super mutant ( _weirdo_ ), who growls and shows his teeth in response. Since he’s still got all his limbs attached after the beast lumbers by, MacCready assumes that was a friendly hello.

Stepping through the line of live turrets, he runs his fingers across the low secondary barricades until he feels hinges and knocks on the hidden gate. It’s answered by a very old woman, her balding skull erratically wrapped in a scarf.

“Got any psycho?” she asks.

“Fresh out, I’m afraid.” ( _Weirdo_.)

She tsks and rolls her eyes, but opens the gate to let him enter anyway. He can’t help but whistle, turning in a full circle to take it all in. There’s a set of power armour hanging in a frame, three or four workbenches (at one of them, a burly man with a dark pompadour turns from his work to grin at MacCready’s wide-eyed awe), guns lined up against the wall, a missile launcher in the corner, boxes of ammo and scrap and half-built mods piled haphazardly on old metal shelves.

“You want to go through there,” the man tells him, jerking his head toward the door. He ducks in and, when his eyes adjust to the gloom, sees the old woman settled now on a very comfortable-looking chair, watching him with bright, beady eyes. She’s like a worm in a cocoon, surrounded on all sides by spilling piles of armour and clothes. His eye falls to the crown of the pile nearest him, a small child’s baseball cap.

“Keep it,” the old woman says.

He smiles, humouring her, and takes off his hat, perching the little cap on top of his head. “It could fit better.”

“In your pocket,” she insists. 

_Weirdo_ , he thinks again, but tucks it in his shirt to pacify and, hopefully, quiet her.

A heavy arms falls over his shoulders, and when MacCready tries to cringe out from under it, firmly grabs his bicep and shakes him. He looks up to see the man from the workbench, or at least the inside of his nostrils. The man grins even wider and stretches his free arm out to take in the storeroom and workspace outside.

"Eh? _Eh_?" he says, shaking him harder.

"Indeed," MacCready agrees, trying to keep some air in his lungs.

"Mama," the man booms, "Mama, you know who this is?"

The old woman just smiles inscrutably and settles deeper into her overstuffed chair.

"Mama, this is him, this is the guy!" MacCready raises his eyebrows as the big man lets him go, only to smack him on the back. "Him and the boss, they took out a _huge_ Gunner base to the south! Those bastards didn't know what hit them. And I mean hit them, Mama, they levelled the place!"

He shoves a fist in MacCready's face. "Put it here, guy!"

MacCready tentatively raises his own fist, unsurprised when the big man punches it so hard his elbow rattles. He lets the hand drop behind his waist and tries to wiggle some feeling back into his fingers.

"How’s that for Quincy’s revenge, eh? Big win for the good guys!"

The big man, who eventually introduces himself as Sturges, demands to hear the story. MacCready gives him a slightly edited version, leaving out the extent of the boss's injuries, not to mention why they hit it in the first place, while he and Sturges dig through the piles for something that fits him. Sturges, probably not unexpectedly, offers dresses more often than not, holding them up to MacCready's body and insisting they're "him".

Sturges' mother watches without a word until MacCready finds some nice sturdy combat armour for his arms to match the ones on his legs, which Sturges tells him to leave: "They’re the General's."

"She won't mind," his mother pipes up, and Sturges just shrugs.

"Guess they're yours now."

He stows them in his pack, not waiting twice for permission, and picks up a likely looking set of leathers.

"Oh, hey, no, forget that - our search is at an end!" 

Sturges crawls out from under a pile clutching his prize, a surprisingly fine grey layered suit and scarf, which MacCready doesn't recognise until Sturges plops the fedora on top.

"No. No, you've got to be kidding me."

"I'm afraid not," the boss chuckles from the doorway.

MacCready wheels around to point at her, then back at the suit. "Is there anyone I've heard of in the Commonwealth that's not you?"

"You caught me," she replies softly. "I'm also Hancock, wearing a bad smoothskin mask."

She touches the suit, slowly running her fingers down a lapel, then takes it from Sturges and holds it up against MacCready. "You know, it's not such a bad idea. It does bring out your eyes..."

He steps away. "Come on boss, Grognak and the Silver Shroud? It'd never work. They'd have to use time travel to get them together, and those were always the dumbest issues."

She snorts and carefully rolls the suit back up. "I suppose you're right."

She goes up on her toes to put the suit on a high shelf, the full skirt of her dress rustling. It's in good shape for a pre-war frock, hardly any tears, and she moves differently in it, shifting her hips more than she has to so the fabric sways.

"Did you bring me that Psycho?" the old woman asks.

"No, Mama," the boss replies quietly.

"I can't see what you need without it."

"No more drugs, Mama. Preston would throw me out on my ass, and I'd deserve it."

MacCready points at the old woman. "This is your mother?"

There's no way she gave birth to anyone twenty years ago. Forty years, maybe, or fifty, but...

"MacCready, meet Mama Murphy," the boss says. "It's more an honorary title."

"It wasn't always," the old woman replies sharply, but regally extends her hand. Half-remembering some old holotape, MacCready impulsively takes the hand and bows his head over it. Murphy titters and catches hold of his fingers with surprising strength before releasing him. "You should keep this one."

"C'mon," the boss says.

"Come in tomorrow and we'll put some work in that old rifle!" Sturges calls after him, but the boss is moving on too fast for MacCready to stay and defend his trusty piece.

She takes him across the street, briefly silhouetted against a floodlight, to the one house on the street with a slightly neglected air, despite the neatly trimmed dead bushes in front. A couple sits together on a double bed in the old living room listening to the radio. Certain they introduced themselves but with less than no idea of their names, he sticks to tapping his hat brim in greeting, then tries to remember if he used to do that so often before he signed up with the boss. Her weirdo vault habits are slowly colonising him.

"We turning in, boss?"

"Ah, no,” she briefly fumbles. "I just thought you'd like to know where you'll be bunking."

"Oh," he replies, then, "You sure?"

Of course she is, and he knows it, or should. They're not on the road. Sleeping near her is just another habit he's picked up without realising. Still, the thought of a night passing without the touchstone of the boss’s snoring feels wrong, like his back without a pack or rifle strapped on.

“You’re not sewn to my hip, Mac,” the boss smiles, self-consciously tightening her sloppy bun, now knotted at the crown of her head. “You’ve got to be sick of me by now.”

And because he catches sight of two things at once, he immediately replies: “Boss, when you’re right, you’re right. Get out.”

And, fortunately, she laughs, punches him on the shoulder, and vacates without another word. Preston – his first observation, lurking antsy-footed in the living room like a man with an over-honed hatchet to bury – ignores every other soul in the place in favour of pushing the boss out the door ahead of him with a hand on the small of her back. And since his second observation is that his room, although small and probably meant for a toilet, has four mostly intact walls, a door to close and only one mattress, he doesn’t wait a heartbeat before closing that door and propping his pack against it.

Out on the road, or hustling for a job that’ll get you there, a man falls asleep before head hits bedroll. There’s never a spark of energy, never a minute of secure unconsciousness to waste, never the privacy to waste it with. Even the idea rarely comes to mind, aside from the occasional dull stretch of guard posting, turning a boring post into hours of grinding frustration.

But, given days of solid meals and sleep and now a door that closes behind him, there’s abruptly no room in his head for anything else.

He’s half-aware of strategizing, finding a scrap of ancient towel in one corner, listening for the footfalls of the guard patrolling outside (close, but not too close), calculating where he’ll be best out of view from the hole in the outside wall, settling with his feet against the door and shifting his mostly destroyed trousers down just far enough to get the job done, but not too far to get back up in a hurry.

The thought occurs as he’s pushing his feet against the door, testing whether he has the leverage to bar any settlers desperate to shake his hand just once more before bedtime, that he’s glad the boss worked things out with her fella. Preston seems like an ok guy, aside from the stick up his butt the size of the GNR radio tower. She should be a hell of a lot more cheerful when they set out (and a happy boss means a generous caps stipend, coincidentally due tomorrow). And he thinks, too, it’s good to finally have his head wrapped around her, to know how this thing will go between them. More killing and scavving and selling, shuffling through her little peacekeeping dance with the Brotherhood, looping back to home base on the reg so she can get some rack time with her man. 

It’s good. Simple. He’ll stack up the caps, and meanwhile scope out the local talent, maybe even find someone in the Minutemen camps willing and tough and trusting enough to hire on with him for the Med-Tek crack. For the first time in a year, it feels like he’s getting somewhere.

Assuming he doesn’t do something idiotic to mess this up, to complicate this simple, straightforward arrangement with a decent boss. Something like taking his half-hard dick in hand, closing his eyes, and instantly seeing her standing in knee-high water with – 

His eyes spring open. _No. Nope. Don’t even._

He takes a deep breath, thinks very hard about every step involved in breaking down, cleaning, and reassembling his rifle, and slowly moves his hand, just a light squeeze – so far so good – and his eyes fall closed, and he sees the muscles shifting in her abdomen as she breaths, great heaving rageful gusts that whistle a little in her still healing nose, sees the large dark nipples, drawn up tight in the chill breeze, through the threadbare grey fabric of – 

_No._ He opens his eyes again _This is not happening._

He doesn’t put much thought into this, ever. Memories worm into fantasy; the girls he knew in Lamplight were, well, girls, and it feels creepy to remember too hard now that he’s so much older than that boy that was with them. And Lucy, even those best years after they re-met up in Big Town…nah. That, all that, stays in the safest farthest reaches of his memories, marked by miles of warning signs before he’d ever get close. No, he just focuses purely on the physical motions, chasing the nerves that twang best, pulling as hard and fast as he can stand to get it over with quick before some thug sneaks up behind him in the alleyway, or, worse, Hancock barges into the bathroom at the Third Rail and criticises his technique. Again.

He keeps his eyes open, tries to find something to stare at, but the dark ceiling’s as bad as his closed eyes for projecting how the stiff underwear cut too tightly into her wide hips, making proud bulges of flesh at both sides, nearly transparent over curls of hair where her legs came together and the insides of her thighs like a trail leading – 

And there is just no way he’s letting go of his dick, he admits to himself. It’s been too long and will probably be too long again until another chance comes his way to shake out the built-up poison, and if she’s going to get laid on their little furlough then he’s certainly owed one peaceful jerkoff.

And he groans, biting on his wrist to muffle it, because if the last image he wants in his head is the boss, probably right now, naked and sweaty and writhing on tangled-up blankets, the image a hundred miles beyond that is Preston in the same state.

So he tries to roll back to the innocence of moments ago, to all that dripping wet skin puckering in the cold, begging for warm hands and mouth and tongue, but his evil sadistic brain is past that. It’s stuck on _right now_ , as in, right now it’s probably still tense, still buzzing from the afternoon’s argument, from weeks of resentment, kissing that’s hard and off rhythm, seams straining and even tearing as clothes are roughly pulled off.

Him and Nora, they get on each other’s nerves so damn often. Right now, it’s too easy to imagine they don’t compete for hours or days to be the one who doesn’t break silence first; they work it out this way. MacCready shuts her up, she shuts him up, he doesn’t care so long as one of them shoves the other to the floor and kisses like she’s trying to suffocate a man to death. Rough hands shove trousers down and skirt aside, knee nudging her clenching thighs apart while her impatient hands pull him forward, in. Her stiff body softening, anger melting under pleasure, hands in his shirt, pulling him closer with needy strength…

Not long after, MacCready falls asleep worrying how the heck he’ll stay employed though their next argument with it obvious he’s hiding a desperate hard-on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, it's ok, Preston's just really super eager to re-take the Castle. Really.


	9. Chapter 9

He’s awake before dawn, too used to sleeping in shifts to doze any later. But he slept like the dead and sits up feeling like he could take on every remaining raider and Gunner in the Commonwealth before breakfast. It’s a minute or so before he realises something's there that shouldn’t be – those familiar low snores, now loud enough to shake the walls – and peeks through a gap to see the boss in the next room, face down on top of the blankets, still wearing the pink dress, now accessorised by a cloud of moonshine fumes.

MacCready grins at the sight, especially when he notices the puddle of drool under her face, and creeps out of the house, past the tightly spooned couple in the front room, before she can feel his amusement and wake up to stutter apologies for things no one outside of an old-world vault gives a rat’s behind about.

Sturges is already up, eating cold radroach stew straight out of a cooking pot, and offers MacCready a bowl before insisting he hand over his rifle for inspection. MacCready only allows it because Sturges refers to it as “that beautiful piece” and leans on the edge of the power armour frame finishing his breakfast while Sturges trades out the standard magazine for a larger one he swears will reload in half the time. He makes a pile of ammo for the pack while MacCready walks up and down the street with his eye to the scope, getting used to the different weight and feel of the old familiar weapon, interrupting to ask “Do you usually borrow Boomer or Little Shooty? And does the General even carry Mr Blammo anymore?”

“Not that I know of,” MacCready shrugs.

“She’s so fickle with her favourites,” Sturges tells him with ominous emphasis, waggling his eyebrows in case MacCready's missed his subtlety.

“Hey,” MacCready diverts him. “After I pick out some new clothes, you mind standing guard so I can wash up before I put them on?”

Sturges makes a show of smelling his armpits and shrugs. “Sure, I’ll join you in that. And don’t wake up Mama digging in the storeroom. I already put your gear together. I’ll get Codsworth to bring it to us at the stream, if you meet me there with a bar of that nice old world soap the General keeps bringing home.”

“Man, I swear, if that robot brings me a dress…” Sturges just grins at him. “Sure, I got the legs for it, but one big gust of wind in battle and I’m done for.”

The Mr Handy actually brings him a newish set of leathers with only a couple of patched-over bullet holes and five good sections of combat armour, the chest piece with a Talon Company logo clumsily re-painted to look like two superimposed M’s.

“Shall I hold sir’s accoutrements?” the robot asks, and it’s so strange to encounter a bot that doesn’t immediately try to saw his legs off that MacCready just allows the robot to take hold of each piece of clothing as he removes it and fly away declaring it would “Have these items treated…properly.”

“It’s going to burn them, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” Sturges replies, and MacCready is grateful he left his hat in his pack. He takes a Rad-X and a few deep, fortifying breaths before running into the cold water with a waist-high splash.

The smush of smothered curses comes out as something like “Muhfracosonofadangit!”

“Brisk, huh?” Sturges calls after him.

Teeth chattering, MacCready ignores him and scrubs up a lather, quickly working it over his chest and armpits. There’s still a trace of smell in the soap, something like punga fruit but sharper. The lather turns grey and slimy quickly but leaves the scent behind, and what was meant to be a quick top-and-tail turns into a full-body scour, even rubbing the bar in his bushy hair until it flops down to drip stinging water in his eyes.

“Woah, hey!” Sturges yells, and because MacCready automatically looks to the treeline across from the barricades for the threat, blinking soap from his eyes, he’s knocked flat into the water from behind. He rolls on his side and throws an elbow backwards, catching nothing but air and a bladder-weakening growl in his other ear.

“Down boy!” Sturges yells. “Friend, Dogmeat, friend!”

 _Dogmeat?_ MacCready rolls on his back, for just a second really expecting to see the skinny cattle dog he used to chase over the rope bridges into the back tunnels, but there’s no chance. That dog was too brave and far too dumb to have reached old age. This dog is young, still half puppy, big and solid, and it whuffs in MacCready’s face with a light shower of spittle, whining and dropping low on its front two feet.

Taking a chance on getting his face ripped off, MacCready rolls again, holding his breath as he goes under, then rolls back the other way. It rinses the soap off him, and the dog chases, tail wagging so hard its whole back half quivers.

MacCready stands, shaking the water out of his hair with a lip-rumbling “brrrrrrrrr!”, and wraps up in the blanket Sturges throws him in exchange for the soap. He doesn’t even try to towel off, just sits on the bank with his rifle clutched in two wool-wrapped hands and watches stark-naked Sturges chase the dog around the creek as if it isn’t more than halfway to winter and gaining speed.

“You need a bathhouse,” he calls to Sturges.

“Yeah, well, it’s stuck in committee,” the big man replies, finding a stick for the dog to play tug-of-war with.

“You guys have a committee?”

“We have three. This is stuck in two of them, one that can’t decide whether we can spare purified water and one that’s arguing over whether it would be a waste of energy to rig up a heater. So, right now, we’ve got the stream…so we mostly just stink.”

MacCready whistles. “I get why the boss is on the road so much.”

As if in echo, he hears the boss’s shrill whistle from the nearest guard post. He jumps and pulls the blanket tighter before turning to her. She leans over the wooden rail, still in that pink dress but with a sheet wrapped around her shoulders, and even from twenty feet away MacCready can see her eyes are bloodshot.

“Hi General!” Sturges waves. He sloshes closer to the shore and nudges MacCready with his foot. “Don’t be so modest.”

“Well, it’s cold,” MacCready protests, hunching further over his rifle.

“Eh,” Sturges dismisses that, striking a heroic pose that pushes his hips forward. “Generals understand shrinkage. They have to, for strategic plans and such.”

The boss snorts and waves him away. “Mac, I want to leave in an hour.”

“I’ll be ready,” he agrees. He waits for Sturges to finish playing with the dog and get back in his own clothes to dress himself, with the blanket on his shoulders to keep off the wind. 

When he gets back to his room to finish packing up nearly an hour later, he peeks through the hole in the wall to find her cross-legged on the bed, chewing her way through a bowl of boiled grain and melon with tired determination.

"Morning, boss," he calls out, before staring through a hole in the wall can get creepy, and she tells him to come in, swinging her legs over the side of the bed to stand.

"Not moving as fast as I planned," she explains with the same old twisted smile, but at least she looks him in the eye when she does it. She stretches until her shoulders pop and continues, "I keep forgetting 21 was a long time ago."

There's a small mirror on a chest of drawers, and when he points at it, she shrugs. Finding his straight razor and a bottle of purified, he sets a 10mm clip on the drawers and props the mirror on it, crouching low so he can see his reflection. He doesn't have to shave often, but after a month, it's starting to resemble the business end of a broom. He wets it down with a handful of water and asks her, "If 21 was a long time ago, and you consider that guy my age a kid, just how old are you?"

"Don't ask a lady her age." She takes the bottle out of his hand with more force than necessary, but when he looks over his shoulder, she's checking the date on her Pip-Boy. "29, give or take. Jesus Christ."

"Get out," he says, giving her the once-over like she'll suddenly sprout sunspots and lose teeth, abruptly turning back to the mirror as it reminds him of the night before. He hadn't realised quite how close he'd been watching her the last month, how fully he'd catalogued every accidental brush of skin.

"I'll...take that as a compliment," she replies, "I think. Although I feel at least as old as Mama Murphy just now."

She holds a rag to the lip of the bottle and tips it up, then rubs her forehead with the damp cloth.

MacCready pulls his lips to one side and scrapes at the bristles on one cheek, turning the mirror to watch her. "So I'm guessing a drink or two is another thing vault society looks down on?"

"Whereas, out here, getting blackout drunk is just a Tuesday?" she responds sharply, catching his eyes in the little mirror, to which he shrugs. She works the wet rag over her face and neck, grimacing at the combination of bruises and headache.

"Actually," she continues quietly, as if she's just talking to herself, "for quite a long time, that _was_ any given Tuesday, especially if Nate was home on leave. When we decided to put an end to that, it wasn't even difficult. Which made how we'd been even worse, somehow."

After a moment, she hands him the rag. He wipes the razor with it and gives his face another swipe.

"I'm getting changed," she says.

"You want me to leave?"

"Just fair warning."

He shifts closer to the mirror, so the bottom of his face fills it, and for a few minutes there's only the rustle of cloth, the click of buckles, and the scrape of the razor. His calves start to ache from his awkward crouch but he keeps still, wishing the quiet could last.

"I'm fairly certain it was Cait's fault. My memory's pretty fuzzy, but I definitely had to talk to her, which led to the usual insult slanging, and that somehow turned into a shots contest, which Strong demanded to join in on, and well, would you tell him he couldn't?"

"No, I wouldn't." He smiles at the image, then stretches his lips side to side, checking if the lines of his remaining beard are even. There's a tap on his shoulder: the boss handing him a pair of surgical scissors. He takes them and starts trimming at his chin.

"The truly horrible thing is, I don't feel nearly as bad as I should, so most of it must have been out of me before I passed out. I just hope Cait or someone managed to get me to the latrines before the worst of it started. Someone certainly left these water bottles here for me."

MacCready's caps are on Preston, but he doesn't want to interrupt. He'll get the full story out of the man himself once they're on the road, which probably won't be any time soon if Preston's in the same shape as the boss.

"In any case, the point of this is that I’ve asked Cait and Strong to meet us in the Combat Zone in a week, after we've sorted this mess with the Castle. I’m overdue to clear out some super mutant strongholds, which we need backup for, and Cait’s been wanting to snoop around the Prydwen when I report in. Any issues with that?”

"None, boss," he says, even though he's sure Strong and Cait will play merry hell with their clean sniping strategy. But at least they'll draw fire away from him.

"Good."

He jumps as she leans over, her face looming in the mirror close to his, and takes hold of the scissors. "Give me those."

Warily, he lets her have them, then move him to sit on the bed and take over evening up his beard herself while he freezes into a manikin and tries not to stare at the fading line of her scar, hanging a breath away from his nose.

"Nate broke some bones in his hand," she eventually says, holding his chin and turning his face to the left and right. "Training accident. Mostly a training accident. I suffered through six weeks of making him presentable every morning for his jackass of a CO, and I can't stand anymore to watch it done badly."

He opens his mouth to protest that he's the expert on his own face, but she shoves the mirror in front of him and...he does look pretty good. He's moving the mirror around to catch a better angle when she steps back, and he finally takes in what she's wearing.

"Hey, what happened to Grognak?"

She turns away, tying the top of her pack shut. "It's getting too cold to play Grognak the Barbarian."

The vault suit is too bright, too blue and too yellow, and he’d wonder how she plans to sneak close to enemies if he hadn’t spent the last month watching her do exactly that in glaring green and red and far too much bare skin. The leather necklace doesn’t look right anymore, and neither does her mismatched pieces of armour. And it’s all too tight, somehow more obviously advertises where the plates don’t protect more than her own flesh used to. When she covers it all with a long leather duster, he can barely see the suit, but he knows it’s still in there.

She snaps her fingers and points behind him, rolling her eyes when he doesn’t see anything and turns back with a quizzical look.

“Close the door,” she clarifies sharply, and when he does, he finds his one-armed jacket in all its filth-encrusted familiarity hanging on the inside and drops his pack to shrug it on over his own gear. “I rescued it from Codsworth’s funeral pyre.”

“Thanks, boss,” he says. “It’s not much, but I’d have missed it.”

“You still have that holotape?” she asks as if he hasn’t spoken.

After a quick search, while the weight of her regard gets heavier on his neck, he remembers the little pocket in the flap and passes the tape over to her. She drops it on the stand next to the bed. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be, boss.”

There’s a sharp breath when she steps out into the bright morning, but she only plops an oversize pair of sunglasses on her nose and takes another sip of purified. The short walk to the gate takes twenty minutes, as she fields an urgent question every other step (not snarling at her settlers, he can’t help but notice, unlike certain employees). It gives him time to decide he’ll not remind her it’s payday until tomorrow.

“Boss, should we take the missile launcher?” She falls silent mid-word and turns away from the settler asking her about space for the new traders’ bunkhouse to stare at him.

He shrugs. “Sounded like a job that requires heavy firepower.”

And he’s always wanted to try out the range on one of them.

“No,” The boss shakes her head. “We start out light, as usual. It’s only when Preston acts as if the job’s dispatching a tiny little raiding party that you end up pinned down under a dozen reavers in the middle of an earthquake. We’ll probably find the Castle occupied by no bigger threat than a crazy cat lady.”

She walks through the gate, finally, with a quiet, relieved huff and starts over the bridge without a backward glance. MacCready hurries to catch up.

“Aren’t we waiting for Preston, boss?”

She frowns over her shoulder at him. “He left last night. It’ll take him a week to cross country, rallying the troops, so we’ll fit in a scavving run through the south of here on the way and meet him there.”

“Oh,” he replies, to fill up the space he’d otherwise use to point out how glad he is not to have _two_ cranky yaoguai for company.

“Should we have cleared the plan with you first, Mac?”

Except, now that he thinks about it, the boss never actually said Preston was there with her, shooting back moonshine with a mutie. And if she’d settled into a warm bed with her fella, it wasn’t very likely she’d have crawled back out to give orders that could of waited for morning.

“I thought you’d worked things out, is all,” he replies, a heartbeat before his train of thought can pull into the station named _and if they didn’t, the last thing I should do is bring that up._ The muscles tightening around the edges of her sunglasses suggest that was the berth he should have aimed for.

And because he’s never met a hole which he couldn’t jam his foot in to break his ankle, MacCready continues. “It’s just, you shouldn’t waste a chance, boss. Not out here. Never know when you’ll get another.”

“And you would be referring to a chance for what, exactly?”

 _Nothing, boss_ is what he should say, and chase it with at least 12 hours of selective deafness, so instead he shoulders the rifle and vaguely waves his free hand in a little circle. “To…y’know…to be close. With the…someone…you love.”

 _To rattle the shared stick out of your butts_ , he manages to close his teeth on, along with: _You could really stand to let the wasteland scrape some of that prude off you_.

“There was nothing like that to work out,” she replies, too quickly, too sharply, and her back is set in such a straight line that her mostly empty backpack hangs low and saggy, like a raindrop. 

MacCready lets her move on ahead, matching her pace once he can no longer hear the grinding of her teeth. Once they pass the Red Rocket station, moving out of friendly territory, he focuses more attention on the space around and behind them, trusting she’s got their path ahead covered. But his sixth sense for threats keeps tugging his attention back to her, to the tenseness pulling her shoulders incrementally closer to her ears, and he’s fairly sure their argument continues even with his own mouth firmly zipped.

There’s movement ahead, far ahead, and the boss shifts to the cover of a wild mutfruit bush, bringing the scope to her eye, and watches. Long seconds after she should’ve let it drop, identified whether friend, foe, or a detour in their path, she’s still staring at what he can clearly see through his scope is a swarm of bloodbugs, in his opinion a nice wide detour as there’s nothing worthwhile on them to eat or sell.

She seems to diverge from him there, apparently determined to stay in that awkward crouch until she’s lit them on fire with her eyes. He moves closer, almost ear to ear, nominally to ensure he hears her orders but mostly from a desperate need to fidget, to shuffle his feet and tap his fingers. When she does speak to him, it’s in a whisper so low the bugs could be in her pocket and not hear, spitting out the words almost too fast for him to follow.

“You do seem to have sussed out that wasn’t always the case, though.”

“None of my business, boss,” he whispers back, shifting his finger inside the trigger guard. “It was just a friendly – ”

“Not long after I left the vault…not long after I lost Nate. A few weeks, maybe a month. Hardly a wait at all, one could judge…the starched seams in my widow’s weeds still crisp when I shucked them off at the foot of another man’s bed. So to speak, anyway; we certainly didn’t have beds back then, just bare floors. And there was no love to speak of either, nothing like that. Just a mutual want to forget…to forget all this, for a night at a time.”

Her narrow gaze flicks briefly to his face, too close, far too close, and back to her scope.

“I suppose I’ve now fallen in your estimation,” she continues, face tight and haughty.

“Not my concern, boss,” he replies, too quickly, and futilely. She surely saw it in his face, that knife-twist of disgust that shot through his guts and left his mouth feeling dry and sour.

“Good. I’m not paying you for your high regard.”

He shows his teeth in something that doesn’t feel like a smile. “I throw that in free, boss.”

She clenches her lips together tight enough to push all the blood out of them, ghastly against the dark mottled yellow of her face, and breathes in hard and deep through her nose. He tries just to listen to that, tries just to see the path behind them when he looks back to get his eyes off her, instead of remembering those desperate months after Lucy died, on the road with a very little boy who still needed milk, needed the food he didn’t have and couldn’t hold a job to pay for, needed his mother as much as MacCready did, and for one very bad, very long moment he could so easily just get to his feet and walk away, all the way back to Goodneighbor, without a glance over his shoulder.

“I thought we were friends, at least,” she whispers, then, and it’s instantly on his lips, _we are, Nora_ , before he sees her eyes are still looking at the months behind her, the ones with Preston, but it doesn’t matter. He knows, then, he’s going nowhere that isn’t following her.

“I’m in procurement,” she snarls quietly, with more venom than he’s ever heard in a human voice. “I negotiate with civilian vendors. I write up contracts. I get the worst ache between my shoulders from hunching over that damn computer collating quarterly spreadsheets and typing up budget reports for the major. I bake a mean beef wellington and whip up a tight pitcher of margaritas on Sunday nights when the girls come over to play poker.”

“I don’t know what any of that means!” he hisses back, still hating her a little.

“I know!” She glares harder into the scope. “Nobody does, not any more. Or you’d all know that exactly jack shit of it qualifies me to be a General, let alone everyone’s own personal saviour. Hell, Mac, I never got farther than corporal. No corporal’s a goddamn hero.”

“Then you were wasted there,” he tells her. And it’s true. He can’t picture her at a nice safe desk half a mile underground, taking orders instead of snapping them out herself, anywhere but out on the road hitting raider camps and shaking down merchants for their last cap.

“Don’t you start. Don’t you goddamn start. I had to leave Preston behind because he looked at me as if I eviscerated a puppy if I so much as mentioned payment for all these favors people ask. And when Danse invited me to join up with the Brotherhood, gave me Sparky, and I told him I’d have to think about it instead of spitting in his face, Preston couldn’t scrape me off his shoe fast enough. Neither of them would travel with me if I was more than their errand girl, and Nick…I didn’t even ask, couldn’t stand it, the thought of letting Nick down.”

She pauses for a deep breath, still staring hard into her scope like the view’s changed at all, and it occurs to him she’s probably only doing it to avoid catching that repulsed look on his face again. “So I needed a merc, someone who’d do the job, take the caps, and leave without a handshake.” 

“Kinda like a whore, huh boss?”

MacCready wants her to look at him, to snap back with a joke of her own that stings a little, to get them back to normal. But she only closes her eyes, props Sparky against her knee, and presses her hands together in front of her face, breathing into them.

“It was a joke, boss, a funny thing?” he whispers insistently, then fills in a retort for her. “I’d make a lousy whore, anyway. I’m bad with people that aren’t in my crosshairs.”

She doesn’t reply for so long that he nervously picks up his own rifle, stares at the bloodbugs, scans a full 365 around them, and still has the time to consider touching her hand, checking she’s still got a pulse.

“I won’t put you in avoidable risk, Mac,” she finally whispers. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you alive when that fails. But I’ve got to make a lot of caps, and I’ve got to make them quickly. Hell, if I could do that on my back, I would, but this economy can’t sustain more than subsistence-level prostitution.”

 _Plus, you’d be worse at it than me_ , he doesn’t joke. The boss is rigged to blow, no matter what he says, but there’s no point in bringing it down on his head any faster.

“Those bastards took my baby. They took Shaun, and they killed Nate when he tried to stop them, and then they killed all my neighbors to cover their tracks, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop any of it.”

She shoves one hand under her oversized glasses to rub at her bloodshot eyes.

“The only reason they left me alive was to use in case whatever barbaric experiments they’re running on Shaun ki-kill him, so they won’t have to start over from the beginning with new genetic material.”

MacCready crouches next to her, feeling useful as a two-legged stool, through a long stretch of molar-grinding silence before she re-sets the sunglasses on her nose and squares her shoulders.

“I killed the man who stole Shaun. Learned he’d sold him to the Institute.”

“Shit,” slips out, and MacCready presses his lips together.

She hasn’t even heard him. “And the only living soul who can tell me how to get into the Institute is hiding deep in the Glowing Sea.”

MacCready wishes he’d saved the curse. He remembers how the caravan he’d hitched on with as a guard heading north had swung wide to go around that blasted landscape, how the animals they encountered were twisted and the undergrowth all the wrong colors, remembered holding his breath while a pack of giant deathclaws savaged an army of reavers at the very edge of his scope’s range.

“You can’t go in there,” he says.

“Not yet,” she replies stiffly. “I need a hell of a lot more Rad-Away, for one thing.”

“What, to make a comfy mattress for your corpse?” he snaps. Hearing his words echo back from the ridge by the road, he drops his voice to a whisper again. “Nora, don’t be an idiot. Draw him out to you.”

“He’s hiding from the Institute, and scared enough to do so inside thirty miles of lethal radiation. You tell me what could draw him back out. Think a nice slice of cheese on a mousetrap will do the trick?”

“I still don’t know what that is,” he hisses back.

“I know,” she growls, before taking a shuddering breath. “There’s my power suit. Sturges has been adding lead plates anywhere he can find the room.”

MacCready doesn’t know a lot about power armour, but he guesses that it might have enough resistance, if she’s also on a constant Rad-Away drip, to get her there with some hair left on her head. Assuming it’s also strong enough to hold off thirty miles of mutant teeth and claws and undoubtedly worse that lives in there.

“But that suit doesn’t run on happy thoughts.”

“Oh,” MacCready whispers, remembering her trades. “Fusion cores.”

“Yeah. Fusion cores.”

“How many?”

“No idea. I’ll have to run some tests on how long they last, how I can stretch out the juice…”

“…which means cutting into your supply for the actual run.”

She nods, mouth still tight and unhappy.

MacCready thinks for a few minutes, trying to find a hole in her plan, or a place they could speed it up. But she’s right. There are only so many caps in the Commonwealth, and only so many ways to get them into your pocket without making the whole wastes your enemy. He’s learned that the hard way.

“Well boss,” he whispers finally, “that’s not a hit I’m looking forward to.”

“You’re not coming,” she retorts. “Of course you’re not coming in there.”

“Boss?”

“Didn’t I just say, no unnecessary risk? You don’t even have power armour. I’m bringing Nick.”

_Nick? Skinny, rickety Nick Valentine, who’d probably shatter into flying gears at one swipe from a deathclaw? No._

“Take Strong. Heck, take that Danse knight. You’ll need real muscle backing you up.”

“Certainly, I’ll just bring a Brotherhood Paladin or a super mutant to an Institute scientist I need to help me. It’s obvious who the brains of the operation is here.”

“Just trying to help,” he mutters, stung.

She lifts Sparky and shoots from the hip, only managing to wing a couple of the bugs while alerting the entire swam to their existence. Smothering another curse, MacCready jumps to his feet, or tries to, realising too late his feet have gone mostly numb from the awkward crouch. He drops to one knee instead and gets his rifle up, concentrating on wings, on getting enough of them down on the ground for the boss to finish them off and penetrate their mad little brains that this is too big a threat for them and…

…there. What’s left of the swarm is just within spitting range when they abruptly whirl and retreat, returning to hover uncertainly in their previous position over a young brahmin corpse. He makes their decision easier by picking off two more, and the rest flee across the safety of a wide stream by the road.

MacCready stands and kicks the road a few times, trying to hurry his feet through the shuddery prickling stage of blood returning, before turning back to the boss. She has her sunglasses up on her forehead, rubbing at those eyes again, and pauses to level a distant, emotionless stare at the road behind him. He lets his own teeth grind now, a tense headache to match her hangover blooming between his eyes, but keeps his mouth closed. He’s not giving her the excuse.

“While I’m gone,” she finally speaks up, “unless you’d like to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere, you could fill in for me with Preston. Cover my settlement runs, arrange for the supplies they need, put down any persistent threats in the area. And if he forgets to pay you, just take what you want from the armoury and sell it. Everyone else does.”

 _If their hands are in the till anyway…_ he remembers, and that stings again, worse than the bloodbugs would have if he’d let them get close enough, but it’s supposed to. He pretends it’s normal between them, that she offered to keep him employed and close so they can set out again as soon as she’s back, heck, that she insisted on amending that stupid contract she wrote out, and replies to that boss instead.

“I’ll take good care of them for you.”

It’s still the wrong thing to say. Just not wrong enough to get him fired. She silently works her way through the corpses, stripping what little gamey meat the carcasses hold (and he groans inwardly, knowing that’ll be dinner, and wonders how he’s gotten so spoiled as to resent the prospect of _any_ fresh meat). He joins her, taking her combat knife while she wraps up what she’s already sliced.

“Take any care you like, or none at all if that suits you more. They’re really not my concern.”

MacCready carefully keeps his tone bland, just-the-facts-boss. “That’s not what I’ve seen, since we’ve been out here.”

He reaches for another strip of leather from her bag to wrap up the foul-smelling meat he’s cut from the bug, and she snatches the combat knife back out of his hand. At his sharply indrawn breath (the blade whipping a hair’s breadth from his thumb), she hesitates, then insists savagely: “If I hop into that Institute and they say, here’s your little boy, sorry for the inconvenience, you can take him home right now if you’ll just stand aside while we blast the entire Commonwealth to a smoking crater…I’d push the button myself.”

He sits back on his heels and rubs at his nose with the sleeve of his leather underarmour, avoiding the radiation-tainted blood on his fingers. The same mess keeps him employed, probably, preventing him from grabbing her shoulder, turning her around and just making her listen until she gets that any parent worth a molerat’s butt feels the same, and anyway it’s not like that deal’s ever gonna be on the table. She doesn’t know he knows, doesn’t know anything about him, really, and for once he almost wishes he’d just rolled the dice on someone, on her, as soon as she agreed to his crazy plea to take on the Gunners, maybe, put all his cards down for her to read through and decide for herself if he was worth the risk while things were still good between them.

All he can say to her right now, quiet and slow so it doesn’t come out as an insult or outright begging, is: “If you meant all that, why would you bother to help anyone?”

She moves on to the next carcass. “Because, Mac…when I finally take on the Institute, one way or another I’ll need an army. Don’t much care which flag they’re flying.”

“Well you’ve got a recruit here. Count on it.”

It’s the wrong thing to say – anything would have been – but maybe the boil that had to pop has finally run low on poison, or maybe she’s just too pis - peeved off with him to bother wasting another breath. Either way, it’s the last nonessential word he gets out of her for days.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for the "Taking Independence" mission.

They step back into routine like a trusty pair of boots, working together with icy professionalism. She moves quickly now, pointing him to his mark after only moments of scouting out the target. He actually misses her radsnail routine, the unnoticed and unappreciated security that she must have worked out every possible angle on every inch of ground before assigning him to the best point. But she applies the same speed to her own moves now, too, eeling through holes in raiders’ sloppy guard patrols, trusting him to clear her path back, usually chased by limping, burning killers. Some perverse impulse inspires him to excel, snapping off headshots as quickly as if they were paces from him instead of twenty yards.

She ignores his performance, aside from handing him 70 caps in the old Rad-Away bag in the middle of dividing up their load the second day out. He packs it low in his bag without comment, that same impulse almost moving him to argue that he’s just doing his job, _boss_ , but while the look on her face would be priceless, that’s still worth less than a 20-cap bonus.

She’s got a list of targets from Preston that she doesn’t bother sharing with him, just giving directions to the next one so he can take point again. MacCready suspects she doesn’t want to risk looking back to catch an expression she doesn’t like on his face more than she needs to plan out every single step they take a mile in advance. Long after her head should feel less like a rotten melon, she keeps the sunglasses on and moves like a wounded deathclaw, all the more dangerous for its vulnerability.

The quiet gives him too much time to run through the last few days, that last argument, and a vague sense of guilt flashes like a scope reflection in the corner of his eye, distracting him from the anger he’s got every right to. He tries to argue with it, with her, to at least wrangle down the appropriate percentage that should land on his shoulders when he can’t shrug it off entirely.

_You were going to blow sometime, carrying all that around. No call to dump it on the guy who’s done nothing but keep you alive and knee-high in fusion cores for the last month. Throw it at Preston, he’s earned it._

And there’s another sticking point, of course. She’s right…he’s got no reason to judge her on that. It’s no one’s business but hers who she sleeps with, or when, and they’re surrounded by other human beings who pass their days kidnapping, raping, and torturing like it’s a sport. There’s no call for her to be the target his disgust lands on, not when they’re methodically stripping corpses surrounded by decorative body parts.

_But I thought we were eye-to-eye, there_ , he argues. _Company on that ugly road you go down when half of you’s ripped out. Didn’t even mind when I thought you’d just moved on, in time…heck, it was almost nice to see, that someone can end up there from here._

But even the version of the boss in his head is smarter than him, and argues back. _You’re right, it is a damn ugly road. Especially those first few miles on it. You’d cling to anyone that made you less alone, kept you from counting and re-counting the bullets in your gun as they dropped closer to just one._

_You think you had it so tough._ He tells himself stubbornly. _A roof over our heads, a floor to sleep on, others adding to the cookpot and building houses, even someone to warm me up on a long night…that would have been paradise. You never left your little guy wrapped up tight inside a pile of rocks, a swallow of bourbon through his lips so he’d sleep deep and quiet while you snuck through a knocking-on-death’s-door settlement stripping what little food and water they had. Your own stomach never wrapped around your backbone while you gave what little you’d scored to him, to keep him alive, the only thing gnawing harder than hunger, the terror of what will happen to him if you starve, or freeze, or if that cut down your arm the guard got it before you could get your knee on his windpipe goes septic, or any of the million missteps waiting in the day ahead. And the one after that._

_You had him_. She doesn’t have to yell back, not when she can just slice down to the bone. _Right there in front of you. You got through that day and the one after that keeping him just barely warm enough, just barely fed enough, and each of those days was another one with him. You didn’t lost both of them. You didn’t go in circles without a clue where he was, if he was even still alive, with the next step toward him so high it might as well be on the moon._

She’s rummaging back in that locked box now, the one he won’t let himself anywhere near. He pushes her out of it, changes tack. _All those horrible things you tear yourself up just for thinking you’d do to keep your kid with you? I did them._

That raised eyebrow. _And that gets you extra points…how?_

_I live with it. I don’t go sleeping with any willing stranger, telling myself I deserve to forget._

Bright lines of laser shots cut through the sky a quarter-mile or so ahead. MacCready steps on the bumper of a rusted Corvega and jumps to the roof, putting the scope to his eye once he can see past the rise of the road.

“Synths,” he calls back to the boss. “Looks like they’ve pinned down one of your supply runners!”

She pelts past him, Sparky already braced against her shoulder, so he works out his own mark. Bullets aren’t much good for killshots against steel and hardened plastics, but they can do some worthwhile damage to the vulnerable joints. She’s already blasting, pulling two of the three first-gen synths away from the attack on the supply brahmin (both of them politely trilling for her to drop her weapon so that this matter may be resolved peacefully), so he gets as close as possible, at an angle where they shouldn’t get in each other’s sightlines, and plinks at the metal arms and the laser pistols they hold so most of their shots go wide of her.

She aims for the chests (for a moment he wonders if she knows they tend to explode from the centre if killed by headshots, or if she’s just sticking to her usual pattern), rapidly blasting first one and then the next with clean hits. Once those two collapse, they concentrate their fire on the last as best they can around the man determined to beat it to death with a pipe rifle. MacCready, aiming for the head, yells at the settler to run before it blows and probably saves the fool’s life.

He’s relieved to see that the vault suit must have some resistance to electrical weapons, as the leather duster is scorched in a few places, but all her limbs are still attached. When she turns to him, though, he sees the ugly, deep burn on the side of her neck, and when MacCready automatically shifts his pack to reach the medical supplies, she orders: “Check on him first.”

He decides she was probably more sensible than stubborn once he reaches the man, who’s badly burned all along his arms and stomach – MacCready can make out the pattern of straight lines when he pictures the man curled up trying to protect his head – but still sighs a little to himself as he hands the man a stimpack and some clean water. That’s another 110 caps out of their pockets…but she’s the General, and this is one of her people, so, needs must. He tells the man to hold tight, not even sure if he’s heard over the guy’s babble of thanks and fragments of story (which, as far as MacCready can tell, begins and ends with “they came out of the woods and shot at me,” but the runner seems determined to compose an epic poem from it), and returns to the boss.

She’s sitting on one of the robots’ smoking chests, prying the faceplate from its top cap with her combat knife. There’s already a little pile of circuits and fuel cells next to her, likely from the other one. The head cracks open, and she looks inside with fascination, pushing bits aside with her blade.

He kneels beside her, not expecting a look up, and gently pushes at her head so she tilts it with a sharp indrawn hiss to give him a better look at the burn. It’s cauterised, cleanly sliced muscle that smells uncomfortably like a good dinner; nothing a stimpack can’t re-grow without a scar so long as it’s injected soon.

“I’ll take care of this,” he tells her, which he knows from experience counts as essential information transmission and not conceding their stupid “I’m not talking to you” competition.

She nods, but orders: “No med-x.”

He knows that the muscle and skin re-growing will be itchy and painful, but he doesn’t challenge her because he thinks he also knows that, after all Doc Weathers’ work, she’s worried about getting hooked on the stuff. And although there’s not a great chance of that happening, it’d be expensive in caps or time and pain to get her back off it, so, no, she’ll just tough it out now.

He imitates the doc now, injecting the stimpack in dabs along both sides of the burn (ignoring her displeased grunt at the series of pricks instead of one big one). As it grows, he gently pinches the edges of skin together so they merge, leaving only that same thin line, bright and pink now but likely to fade as much as the one on her face. It’s not a quick process, and after a few minutes he gives up and sits in the road before his feet can go numb again, long enough to pick up the thread of his silent argument.

But it feels stupid, beyond stupid, that he can read so much into two words from her, manhandle a sensitive stretch of her skin for minutes on end, but has to make up an imaginary version of her to tell: _I never wanted to forget, didn’t feel like I deserved to stop hurting for even five minutes, with someone else. And heck, it’s not like there are many out in the wastes who meet an erratically employed killer-for-hire with a little kid needing raised and a mouth far smarter than the rest of him, then tell themselves, I’ll take an extra-large slice of that, please and thank you. If anyone had, anyone at all…_

He’d have grabbed Duncan and run a mile. Because he’s not the boss. He can’t trust anyone. _But you, you smile and spit out your long old world sentences with words no one knows and folk hear: “Hi there! You can either join me and prosper, or you can get in my way and be naked meat for crows by sundown – your call!” Anyone brave enough to make a grab at_ that _brass ring…_

It’s the real boss he wants to apologise to, tell her he gets it, that being alone out here is really the last thing he wants, too, but instead he starts small and concedes the game, pointing to one of the components she’s stripped out for Sturges and the Red Rocket boys. “Those gen-three synths, the ones that look totally human? That’s the only way to tell. They’ve got a smaller version of that homing beacon thing, jammed in where the spine joins the skull.”

She goes very still while he talks. The combat knife trembles in her hands, and he wonders if it just started, or if it was harder to see before when she was working with it.

“It’s not exactly an easy spot,” he continues quickly, “Not when you’ve got two twins each insisting they’re the real one. Mostly, you only know afterward whether the right one got gunned down.”

She looks up at him then, just a moment’s irritated glance as if he’s somehow won the game by crying off early, but she’s pale, and her pupils are still as blown out as if the synths were still shooting at her. It worries him, her acting like a recruit just off her first battle. She usually comes down quick after it’s all over but the looting, a little out of breath, maybe, or more careful than usual in where she puts her feet, but that’s just good sense in booby-trapped raider dens. This is different.

“What’s next, after we ferry this wayward babe home?” he asks, trying to distract her from whatever’s going through her head.

“Ferals,” she replies shortly. “Took up residence in the National Guard training yard again.”

All business. After they drop off the injured runner and catch a few hours’ sleep in the settlement bunkhouse, MacCready tries again, intoning ominously: “Man, it’s quiet. _Too_ quiet.”

Nothing. That usually gets at least an eyeroll out of her. He keeps trying whenever they’re alone, commenting on the buildings they pass or throwing out a joke while they split up the load (and once, “Commonwealth Bank of MacCready, open for business!” earns him a sarcastic snort), but she only gives orders in return. On longer walks between settlements and targets, he hears her breathing behind him, rapid and shallow, as if they were on the run from a pack of mutthounds.

It’s easier in some ways, running the settlements instead of picking through the city. They trade any meat they’ve hunted for a couple bowls of whatever meal they’ve arrived nearest to, exchange their spoils for the caps, Rad-Away and occasional fusion core the settlers got selling their last load, and sleeping arrangements are as simple as claiming two mattresses. He makes a point of picking two by a wall and shoving them together, settling on the outside one so she has to climb over him, which she does with no more communication than an irritated glance. There’s some significant looks from the locals, but his gut says not to leave it too easy for her to slip off in the middle of the night.

But the settlements are harder, too, in a lot of ways, mostly on the boss. There’s reports, complaints, inspections, and a heck of a lot of wasted time on idiots who just want to brag later that they’ve got the General’s ear, that the General personally praised their ideas. If no one distracts them, the boss’s face is grey with exhaustion underneath the old bruises by the time they turn in.

It helps a little that news of the Gunner hit has raced ahead of them on merchant brahmin hooves. Even better, the story making the rounds isn’t “RJ MacCready gave his old bosses a bloody nose and now has a big fat bounty on his head” so much as “The Minutemen are back, and they’ve avenged the Quincy Massacre.” He’ll happily tell that tale a dozen times a day if it gives the boss a break, even if it’s hard not to punch all those shining, proud faces that rarely face anything worse than a sore throat from complaining how all the free food and beds and turrets protecting them could really be tastier and comfier and shootier.

The long walk to the Castle after the last settlement is almost a pleasure, even though they’re plagued by mirelurks along the coast and once have to lay behind a second-floor wall trying not to breathe while a scarred grey deathclaw prowls the street underneath, growling and snuffling and dragging long claws on the brickwork to sharpen them.

“It’s not deathclaws we’ve got to clear out of the castle, is it?” he asks after it’s finally moved off north.

She shakes her head. “Preston only said they lost the fort a long time ago. If it were infested with deathclaws, he would have warned us.”

“What would you put caps on, then?” he asks, shading his eyes to eyeball the best path through the narrow streets and crumbling buildings. “More ferals…muties?”

No answer.

“Crazy cat lady?” he tries.

“Mirelurks,” Preston tells them and the troops he’s gathered at the rendezvous point in a wrecked Sullivan’s diner.

“Mirelurks?” the boss repeats flatly, giving MacCready a subtly incredulous look, eyes just a little wider, lips just a little tighter, and he tries not to feel warm all through. She changed when they stepped through the broken door and faced the sad little group Preston managed to rouse, sidling closer so their shoulders almost touch. Just like that, it’s them versus this gang of idiots they’ve got to keep from gumming up their smooth works.

“Are these for anyone?” he asks Preston, gesturing at the scatter of mines and ammo on the counters.

“A _lot_ of mirelurks,” Preston clarifies, a little defensively, nodding at MacCready to help himself.

He does, thinking, very quietly, _arrogant jagoff_ , automatically splitting the loot between their two packs. He assumes the rest have already equipped themselves, _and if not, snooze and lose, buddy_.

“Fine,” the boss sighs. “Mirelurks, then. Mac, you sick of roasted ‘lurk, yet?”

“A little, boss,” he says. “We’ve been eating it the whole trip down the coast.”

“I…also expected to face worse,” Preston admits. “The records of the battle itself were badly corrupted, and the clearest sentence we could make out seemed to read ‘Don’t go near this base except to nuke it from orbit.’ Whatever force took the castle must have ultimately abandoned it, leaving it to be reclaimed by nature.”

“A dozen razorclaw ‘lurks are still nothing to sneeze at,” one of Preston’s troops, a blonde man in a cowboy hat insists. “We should rush ‘em. Keep the element of surprise.”

Two more pipe up with plans, a pincher attack or a fireline, and all eyes turn to their General. She holds up both hands and demurs: “I’ll have to scout it for myself, first.”

She doesn’t ask him to come with her, but since she doesn’t forbid it, either, he follows and settles next to her belly-down on a high sand dune to watch a couple dozen ‘lurks pace within the castle walls, some of them already hunkering into the sand to sleep.

“Height is no good for this,” she murmurs, “Or I’d put you up there on the wall itself.”

“No, boss,” he agrees quietly. “Got to be low to put a bullet in those faces.”

She scans the area for a long time, reminding him of that first raider hit, absently worrying her bottom lip in her teeth. “I’m going to regret this the second one of those green recruits sprays me with buckshot, but my call is we stick to our usual plan: I draw them out and around, you and the rest pick them off in ones and twos outside the wall. Do you still have those mines?”

He hands them over and watches the ‘lurks through his scope while she creeps through the break in the wall, both of them freezing every time one of the beasts twitches, and sets the mines in the narrowest stretch far enough apart they won’t trigger each other off. As they carefully move back to the diner, she whispers, “Tomorrow, I’d appreciate it if you could clear out as many as quickly as possible, to minimise the window in which one of these well-intentioned fools could blow my head off.”

That’s the real plan, he knows, while he listens to her break it down into infantry dummy talk for the troops. Before dawn, when the cold-blooded mirelurks will be torpid but there’ll be enough light to avoid their own crossfire, she’ll point and he’ll shoot.

“It’s been a long day, boss,” he pointedly observes after Preston starts toeing lines on the dirty floor meant to mark out the fortress and pathways, speculating on what-ifs and how-abouts like they’ve got all night. She nods and orders the troops to get some rest, assigning watch shifts and taking the first herself.

Most of the recruits lay out bedrolls on tables, off the cold floor. MacCready settles in one of the narrow booths, the old plastic creaking as he crosses his arms and slumps, trying to set his head in a position that won’t leave his neck frozen in the morning. He opens his eyes as the plastic squeaks again: Preston setting up opposite him, in position to watch the door. The older man nods and leans across the table.

“The General told me about the Gunner battle. Damn fine work, MacCready.”

Preston seems determined to shake his hand, so MacCready pulls them tighter into his armpits as if in response to the chill wind from the doorway.

“Proud to have you with us,” he continues insistently, and MacCready nods a curt thanks before pointedly closing his eyes, tipping his hat low to be completely sure the other man can’t see his eyes roll.

_”The General”, huh. He probably even saluted her in the sack._

But he wasn’t lying to Nora when he said it’d been a long day, and even the insistent presence of the guy who’d dumped the boss for caring about her kid more than a bunch of as-arrogant jagoff strangers can’t keep him awake long. He’s jostled out of a restless doze much later by the woman in question trying to vault to the inside of the booth without waking him, succeeding only in planting her boot in his side.

He suppresses a groan and wiggles to the very edge of the seat to give her room, whispering, “I’d have given you the booth if you asked.”

She scrunches down and props her feet up on the opposite bench, where Preston had been sitting before she’d undoubtedly woken him for his shift (and MacCready does take some small measure of satisfaction that she assigned him the worst one, stuck snatching a couple hours of sleep on either side of a cold midnight stroll).

“Isn’t that our routine now?” she whispers back. “You on guard duty even while unconscious?”

The edge in her voice suggests she’s well aware he hasn’t been watching her back so much as preventing a partnership jailbreak, but he can’t resist needling her. “Good to know you’re trainable.”

She doesn’t rise to that, just tucks her blanket under her legs and settles against the window, and it feels like less than a heartbeat’s passed when Preston carefully shakes him awake. MacCready only realises how warm their shared body heat had been when he shivers in the wee-hours chill, watching Preston slide into his place with a grateful sigh.

He walks the perimeter with the other guard, his mood lightening as the blood gets moving through his legs. He’s always liked the last shift, stars winking out as the sky slowly brightens. MacCready notices the other guard’s white knuckles on her rifle and eyes that keep getting stuck on her own feet. He asks in a whisper whether she’s been in battle before, and when she confesses this is the first time she’s planning to do more than get off a few potshots and run, he tells her how to line up your next six or so steps, then scan the likeliest points of attack – she doesn’t complain when he points these out to her – then check the path ahead again. Once she’s no longer tripping over her own feet and might notice a threat more than a foot away, MacCready tells her to watch the mainland side of Sullivan’s while he checks on the mirelurks, adding to his battle plan: knock that one over early before she murders the boss.

He settles back on their dune and watches the courtyard, but the animals are quiet, hunkered down together in the sand so only the humps of their shells are visible between clutches of eggs. There’s a lot of them, sure, but the mines will cripple the first wave, and then the rest will have to clamber over those bodies. That’ll space them out enough to keep the pack from rolling through their firing line. It should be quick and clean, over before the sun’s up.

A low whistle from behind warns him not to jump before the boss settles down next to him. “No movement?”

“None, boss.”

“Good. The others are setting up. Be ready in ten.”

It’s closer to twenty minutes before the troops are all in place, but who’s counting? He ignores the rest of them, watching the boss creep through the minefield, and drops to one knee with his rifle set to his shoulder. The guard from earlier has moved next to him, he notices, imitating his stance.

“Widen your feet a bit,” he whispers, “and loosen your grip, or the recoil will slow your next shot.”

The blast of a frag grenade pulls his attention back where it should be. He counts slowly to three, and right on time, there’s the boss, leaping up to the broken edge of the wall to avoid the mines and turning to pop off a few more blasts from Sparky. She jumps just before the first mine blows, rolling behind the wall for shelter, drops Sparky, and comes up holding Boomer.

He loses his eyeline to her then, picking his own targets as the first wave staggers on dragging legs and then awkwardly clamber and roll over the smooth shells of their fallen comrades, but Boomer’s distinctive blasts are a regular heartbeat on the other side of the battle. She’s pulling several to the side, spreading out the targets so the new recruits have more chance of getting in solid headshots.

The blond cowboy breaks the fireline first, of course, leaping over the dune with a wild yodel and running forward to bayonet a wounded ‘lurk in the face. He takes that one down, but not the three that immediately surround him. MacCready bites back a curse as the other fresh recruits follow and waste bullets in the beasts’ thick shells, scrambling to another low position closer to the wall where he can put some lead in their soft faces, passing on shots again and again as the recruits wildly dance in the melee.

In the end, it’s a free-for-all that ends with most of the recruits injured (not the cowboy, though, no; he’s barely even scratched) but by some miracle, no one’s dead. The boss approaches him through the mess of limping troops and ‘lurk glop, her mouth set and, from the flaring nostrils, taking very deep breaths while Preston pesters her with plans for the fort for the next decade, starting with clearing out the egg clutches.

“Uuurgh,” the boss groans quietly as the first clutch the recruits approach explodes into slimy hatchlings. They latch onto every nearby leg, and chaos reigns again as the recruits try to kick them off and stomp, with the cowboy wildly swinging his rifle.

“Someone’s going to lose a foot,” she tells him in a low voice, and then yells across to Preston: “I’ll secure the interior!”

Preston glares at them both, but MacCready only points at the boss’s rapidly retreating back, shrugs, and scuttles after her. Cries of disgust and pain follow them into the old stone walls, which are damp and dark and echo their footsteps back to them in strange off-rhythm patterns. He reaches high and follows the dead electrical line sunk in the walls by touch until the boss is satisfied there are no more mirelurks hiding in the corridors and flicks on her pip-boy light.

The boss’s idea of “securing the interior” is more “pocket every sand-caked bullet and stimpack she sees,” which suits MacCready fine. There’s not much to find until they reach the armoury, passing through a hallway with a tall window opening through which he can see a rusted water purifier sunk in the edge of the sea. Before he can point this out to the boss, she whistles, and he runs to catch up, lifting his rifle.

There’s no threat, though, just a Fat Man wrapped in oiled linen that she immediately lifts to her shoulder and squints into the scope.

“We have one of these in Sanctuary,” she tells him, caressing the single mini-nuke on the shelf next to it, “but not quite this nice. This one has racing stripes!”

“I think you should maybe put that down, boss.” She’s almost smiling. “You’re getting a little too excited for my comfort.”

“Never,” she replies. “Ker-Pow here is my new best friend.”

She carries it (him? MacCready thinks it looks more like a her) into the next room, but immediately backpedals.

“More eggs,” she explains, and hefts Ker-Pow hopefully.

He gives her a flat look and pulls a frag grenade from the side pocket of her pack.

“Fine,” she sighs, a little theatrically. “Let’s move all this out of harm’s way.”

They haul the contents of the armoury down the hallway, or more accurately, MacCready hauls most of it while the boss points out the least damp places to store them and pokes at Ker-Pow’s controls whenever she thinks he isn’t looking. He’s not even tempted to complain, though. It’s closer to his old Grognak-of-War partner than he’s had in too darn long. He even throws the grenade himself, running back to where she’s hunkered down underneath the window hole before it blows.

“What’s next?” he starts to ask, rubbing his ringing ears, before noticing that the surf’s gone from a weak slap to big rolling waves, swamping the old purifier and breaking against the castle wall.

He points, and the boss stands just in time to catch the thing rise from the water, shedding hatchlings like scales. MacCready can’t get his eyes to take it all in at once: the size of a building, one of the really big ones in the DC Warzone, something like a big mirelurk, and something more like hundreds of normal-sized mirelurks all smushed together, appendages shot out at all angles and at least two huge sets of claws. And somewhere in all that is a mouth, because it roars loud enough to cut right through the ringing in his ears.

He looks to the boss, hoping she’ll have the same annoyed expression she gets at a tricky raider den, just before she snaps out a plan. But she looks as terrified as him.

“Oooooooh…” she starts, mouth hanging open, and finally finishes weakly: “…dear.”

MacCready grunts agreement, frantically loading a fresh magazine in his rifle.

“Forget that.” The boss shoves it to the floor and drops Ker-Pow in his hands, jamming the mini-nuke into his pack. She pushes him toward the door, ordering: “Get back to the mainland and climb up to any roof you can reach. We’ll cover you, keep it busy as long as we can, no more than five minutes, and then we’re leading it right down the main path to you.”

“Yeah, boss,” he agrees quickly and runs through the frozen recruits in the courtyard, the big machine jouncing his shoulder and threatening to slide to the ground with every step.

The monster roars around the side of the fort as he pelts through the gate, stained pink in the lurid sunrise, and MacCready automatically zig-zags, scrambling over a wrecked Fusion Flea Supreme. Hot acidic goo flies over him, a few drops the size of his spread hand landing on the leather of his coat and sizzling. Bright laser lines cut over his head, and he hears the boss and Preston screaming at the thing, turning it back around to the fort.

MacCready shifts the big weapon so he’s cradling it like the world’s largest baby and gets to his feet again just as a wave of hatchlings off that monster’s back catch up to him. He lets the leaders of the pack bite through his leathers without fighting and concentrates on outrunning them, not falling on his face or dropping the heavy launcher.

The buildings at the mainland end of the peninsula look so very small. There’s time to remember and individually regret every cigarette he’s ever smoked before he reaches the first likely perch, wheezing and tripping up the stairs with a few stubborn hatchlings still following. There’s no time to stomp them, barely seconds to set Ker-Pow up on his shoulder, once he reaches the roof. The monster’s nearly at the town, chasing Preston and the boss, who slow it down by racing around buildings in opposite directions. The thing chitters in aggravation, swaying between the two of them and spraying an arc of acid that stinks like a battery explosion.

The boss and Preston are still too close, barely out of the blast range, but it’s the best chance he’ll get. As the monster finally swings to follow Nora, he loads up the mini-nuke, wincing at the cheerful _ding!_ right in his ear. He’s never even touched a Fat Man before, but it’s a gun and it’s got a scope, even if the recoil knocks him on his butt, and as soon as the little warhead reaches the pinnacle of its arc he knows the shot is good. He scrambles to his feet just in time to get knocked back by the concussion through the broken floor behind him, smacking his head on the floor below.

MacCready swims for a long minute, the water above all wavery oranges and pinks and reds before it’s washed away by dark smoke, and he’s forgotten again which direction takes him back up into air. When he tries to kick, his heels drum on something solid, and when he rolls and pushes himself up he nearly keels over in the other direction. The heaviest smoke brushes past him in one last gust, and he can see now the giant steaming thing in the road, huge and twitching but almost certainly dead, and a much smaller smoking thing close to him. He staggers to it, pretending his eyes are wrong and that’s not a giant stupid hat but Nora’s sensible helmet, but of course it’s Preston groaning under his hands when he rolls the heavy body over.

He stands, swaying, going up on his toes to look in the direction he thinks he last saw Nora running, and only sees that jerk cowboy, still fresh as a newborn daisy, but at least he’s got the boss in his arms and is running out of the mini-nuke fallout that’s probably making her pip-boy tick like a clock on buffout.

He gets his hands under Preston’s armpits and drags the bigger man (still mumbling orders, something about a radio tower) after them, detouring as far as he can around the dead monster. Halfway up the path the cowboy sprints down to meet him and takes Preston’s feet so the two of them can swing him up the path faster.

“How’d you survive that without a scratch?” he growls at the cowboy.

“I fell in a hole,” the man replies, not meeting his eyes, and MacCready decides not to challenge that until they’ve hauled Preston out of danger, and he’s gotten a look at the boss. Preston’s face and hands are both burned, but stimpacks are great with burns. It’s the blood from his gums trickling over his lips, the way he gags and twists in their arms, that’s more worrisome. At least if the boss is in the same shape.

They set Preston down next to Nora on one of the tables inside Sullivan’s and MacCready dumps out his pack to get at his half of their med supplies. The cowboy grabs a handful and gets to work on Preston while MacCready rushes to jab stims in Nora’s burns and cuts, relieved to see when he unzips the neck of her suit that the skin underneath is ok. There’s a fine mesh on the inside that might be lead particles woven into the insulation, but when he checks her pip-boy, her radiation levels are well into the acute range, within kissing distance of lethal.

He finds her bag underneath the table, most of it literally dripping away from the creature’s acid, but fortunately anything metal or stuffed inside a lunchbox, like her small pond of Rad-Away, is safe. He plunges into it recklessly, hooking one into her pip-boy, squeezing it hard, and replacing it with a fresh one as soon as it’s dry. The cowboy matches him bag-for-bag with Preston, after an aghast stare at the boss’s reading, eventually pausing to insist they set each other up with a bag themselves, since they through that same mushroom cloud getting the commanders out of it.

MacCready barely feels the needle jabbed in his wrist and snarls silently at the waste of time returning the favour, but Nora’s pip-boy reading steadily drops until he’s willing to let the last bag drip in gently. When he tries to stand, his stomach does a barrel roll that pushes him to hands and knees on the floor, and then the cowboy’s hauling him back into the booth, moving a finger in front of his nose and muttering about a concussion, and after the sting of a thick stimpack needle in his neck he doesn’t feel like doing much of anything but watch Nora and Preston’s skin grow back with his chin resting on both hands.

* * *

By the time all three of them are back on their feet, the cowboy’s got the radio generator working and called in reinforcements. Preston makes a nuisance of himself, parading MacCready around with a hand glued to his shoulder, interrupting folk repairing turrets, fortifying broken walls, or butchering mirelurk to once again tell The Tale of Taking Independence. He’s almost glad when Preston finally asks (after ascertaining MacCready’s got little skill with machines and less with mirelurk cuisine) if he’d mind volunteering for gravedigger duty.

He takes the nearest recruit he recognises, mostly out of pity for the kid’s shellshocked amble since his arm’s tightly bandaged to his side, liberates the stiff half-rotted blankets from the fort’s storeroom, and goes hunting bodies. It’s not long before they find the woman he’d split guard duty with, torn to pieces along the outer fort’s wall.

“Aaaaaah, crap,” he mutters, laying a blanket over the remains and rolling them together. “Poor kid.”

“Ursa,” the other recruit says, looking away. “She was nice.”

It’s a poor eulogy, but they’ve got even less for the others, not even names to say after they’ve rolled them into the hole MacCready digs near Sullivan’s and pushed the sand in over them. Afterward, he washes his hands in the sea, nearly shuddering out of his skin imagining the mate of that monster leaping out and gnashing him up whole, and climbs to the top of the highest wall for self-assigned sentry duty.

The boss joins him after a peaceful hour of letting the harsh ocean wind and high sun battle it out over the temperature of his skin, a bottle of Gwinnet Stout in hand. “How’s the head?”

“Still attached. How’s the…everything?”

She waves vaguely at her pip-boy and shrugs, sitting next to him to stare out at the waves and that eerily floating Brotherhood airship.

“Thought I saw you go down under all those hatchlings,” she says. “When we got that thing back around the fort so I could look again, you weren’t anywhere.”

She rubs her nose and takes a sip of beer.

“You stuck to the plan anyway,” he points out.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down,” she replies quickly, then in response to his raised eyebrow, she slowly tilts her head until it almost touches her shoulder. “Also, I was pretty sure, if I had to, I could lose the monster in those narrow alleys and just keep running.”

He snorts and smiles down at his hands, loosely wrapped around the rifle in his lap. They watch the Brotherhood base pass in and out of low clouds for a while, as quiet as they’ve been on the road all week. She shifts her legs, but instead of standing, brings her knees up high enough to rest her chin on them.

“That Gunner hit,” she starts. He shakes his head, but she continues anyway. “It scared the hell out of me. Your idea, my plan…it was just dumb luck that we’re both not dead after days of those bastards’ loving care.”

MacCready winces. He should have known she’d figured that out, too. “We walked away, though.”

“Barely. I got us both laid up, nearly killed…I couldn’t forget it, every step I fucked up, every way it could have gone worse. Then, and every damn time I go out on the road.”

“Boss,” he starts, but unlike some people, he listens when someone shakes their head.

“Today,” she says slowly, “we killed a monster. An honest-to-god sea monster, like something out of a holo. It rose out of the sea, and I zapped it with lasers.”

He looks up at her in time to catch the grin spreading across her face, just before she throws her free arm around in his neck in a hammerlock.

“And you shot a mini-nuke at it.” She laughs and squeezes, shaking him until he can hardly breathe, until he shifts his rifle out of the way to get an arm around her waist and squeeze back. She eases off a little, then, still chuckling. “And we’re still here.”

She rubs her nose again and blinks down at the waves, belatedly sniffing. He notices then that she’s left Sparky behind, doesn’t have a scope to hide under, and wonders if he should offer a loan of his rifle.

“This last week,” she says, “it’s been bad, I know. Letting things build up, ripping into whatever idiot cares enough to hang around, that’s been a problem since before – before I left the vault. It’s part of why we quit drinking.”

She takes another sip of her beer.

“But it’s also been good. I stopped…I couldn’t manage it any more, getting ready for anything, every time. And it was ok, because anything I dropped the ball on, you picked up. Even a sea monster.”

She half-strangles him again, and all he can do is wordlessly return the awkward hug, clutching his rifle tight. She tilts the half-empty bottle toward him, and it’s a near thing, choosing which hand to free up, but it’s her he releases to take the bottle, emptying it in one long swallow.

“I want to leave tonight for the Combat Zone,” she says, boots scraping on stone as she gets to her feet. “Before Preston can ask me to take the good word and my free services out to more than the two independent settlements he’s already talked me into. Ok?”

“Uh, ok, sure,” he responds to her abrupt change of topic, and fumbles for something else to say that doesn’t sound like the village idiot, but she’s already halfway down the stairs and yelling up to him, “And I have no idea how sea monster assassination figures into your bonus structure!”

“First crack at the loot for the next year sounds fair,” he calls back, and barely hears her reply over the waves: “Keep dreaming, Mac.”

He holds onto the bottle for a long time before throwing it into the sea and finding a spare, if musty, bedroll in the shade of the courtyard wall, wishing fervently for just ten minutes back in his room in Sanctuary. He drops into a restless doze, the bustle of settlement setup invading his dreams of a sea monster bonus, but he knows what it’ll be: she’s going to help him crack Med-Tek, and she’ll do it for free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: You can't actually get to this fat man until a mission beyond the monster. But you will definitely want to have one on you.


	11. Chapter 11

It’s harder to escape the castle than she’d planned, of course. He waits by the broken wall, watching impatiently while Preston gives her the parade treatment, his hand vice-gripping her shoulder this time. Except now, that hand’s creeping closer to her neck, with the man attached close behind. Preston catches his stare, looking over his shoulder for his next victim to subject to the heroic saga and 10-year fort plan for the third time that day, and then very slowly removes his hand, trying to stuff it in pants that don’t have a pocket.

Realising he must have a face like a radcloud and remembering that he’ll be working for this guy while the boss is away, MacCready pastes on a friendly smile.

Preston takes two careful steps back from the boss and finds something to keep him busy back in the workshop, offering no more personal goodbye than a salute from across the courtyard.

“Preston went a bit funny, there at the end,” the boss observes as they head out of earshot on the double.

“Probably still sick from all that Rad-Away,” MacCready offers innocently.

“Don’t even say that word,” the boss groans, rubbing her stomach.

They find Cait and Strong trading insults in the wreckage of the old Combat Zone ring where Cait spent so many years as a prizefighter, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth. MacCready interrupts the turn to grab a swig for himself and offer it to the boss, who waves it away. He’s been in the doghouse for much of their walk, ever since he couldn’t remember where exactly he’d dropped Ker-Pow and, with the sun going down, they had to give her up as missing, likely picked up by one of the city refugees picking their way past the still-glowing sea monster to sign on at the castle. Only his keen eye and quick reflexes, spotting a Sporting Goods sign in some rubble and clambering up to the third floor with the wreckage sliding under his feet, all to emerge with a big waxed-canvas camping pack still in its crumbling cardboard box, have gotten him firmly back in her good graces.

At least she’d spent the walk between quietly moaning about how much she’d liked that Fat Man, how many caps she’d have gotten for it in Diamond City, instead of ignoring his existence. He thinks he’ll point that out later, when she’s in a better mood, and tell her how proud he is that she’s grown. Maybe pat her on the head.

MacCready hasn’t asked her yet, though, and he won’t for the next few days. He tells himself it’s because he doesn’t want to drag Cait and Strong into it – he likes them, sure, but to trust them with something like this? – but mostly, the road’s just too good right now. 

He’s always been happy when the boss called for a detour around mutant strongholds, since they’re hard to kill and rarely have much worth selling on them. Even their rifles are hard to flog, since mutants tend to leave deep gouges chewing on the stocks. But it’s Brotherhood work the boss owes, and she says they’ll get caps to re-supply, and in any case it’s her problem to figure out where his wages will come from.

He was right about Cait and Strong throwing their usual plan into total chaos, but it probably wouldn’t have worked too well with muties, anyway. It takes too many bullets to penetrate those thick skulls for him to pick them off with any speed while they swarm the boss. Cait likes to get up close in battle, particularly where her razorblade-lined bat can do some real damage, which isn’t the best strategy against super mutants who’ve got twice the reach on her. So she’s assigned to keep close to MacCready and slow down those that rush him long enough for him to get a bullet through the vulnerable eye sockets.

Strong and the boss pair up, too, her aiming for green knees and elbows with Boomer, then getting out of the way so he can finish the crippled fighters with a concrete-weighted power fist. That’s the overall plan, anyway, but it usually quickly devolves into the kind of mad free-for-all he hates, and they go through their supply of stimpacks faster than jars of purified, but what the heck. They’re having fun.

Strong is a brutal fighter, charging into a den as if he’s immortal. But he’s not, and he’s hidden under the cover of a broken ceiling when the boss screams that wordless caw that means one of her friends is hurt and so everyone nearby is going to die. MacCready swings his legs out over the wall he’s set up on and slithers awkwardly down the concrete slab, dropping his rifle and lifting Little Shooty in both hands as he follows them into hell with Cait on his heels.

It’s so much closer than he’s used to, the chaos of melee fighting, and his brain turns off, letting his eyes and fingers pick targets between friend and foe, lets his feet scramble before he’s actually noticed the nail board swinging for his head, and Shooty roars in his hand as loudly as a brave little 10mm can manage. He rolls into cover to reload and surges out howling, and somehow it’s over, and even though he’s half-blind from a bleeding cut over one eye and all his ribs feel caved in, only the four of them are standing. He holsters Little Shooty and jumps, riding the last jolts of the battle high.

“Tunnel Snakes rule!” he shouts exuberantly.

The boss drops Boomer, then slowly turns to look back at him, wiping green blood from her eyes. “What did you say?” she asks slowly.

He picks up the shotgun, giving her a quizzical look. “Just something I guy I knew used to shout.”

“Tunnel Snakes rule?” she repeats.

He shifts on his feet. “Yeah, and?”

Cait looks between them, finally echoing him: “Yeah, Nora, and?”

The boss takes Boomer from him, staring with one eyebrow raised. “Tunnel Snakes?”

“Yeah?”

“Like ‘tube steak,’ or,” she waves her free hand in little circles, rolling her eyes skyward. “…or, or, ‘cave burglar’? That kind of tunnel snake?”

He frowns. “It was just the name of his gang,” he explains. _Cave burglar?_

“Oh…” Cait says slowly, and laughs harshly, pointing at MacCready like she has something to say until she notices a gore-caked stash of jet in one of the meatbags and excuses herself instead.

“Tunnel Snakes?” the boss repeats again.

“Yeah,” he confirms, and when she only looks at him, lips pursing and little snorts starting in the back of her nose, he continues. “He grew up in a vault. Tunnels, right? And, I guess, snakes look good embroidered on a leather jacket.”

She pinches the bridge of her nose and chokes, “He had a tunnel snake embroidered on his jacket?”

“Yeah,” he says again, feeling like a stuck holotape. “He asked me to join. Since I grew up in a cave, still tunnels, right?”

Her hand moves to cover her eyes. “So you,” snort, “you’re a tunnel,” snort, “snake?”

“No,” he frowns, hating that she won’t let him in on the joke. “I didn’t have time for that kid stuff.”

She takes two deep breaths and nods. “Good to know. Let’s – ” snort “ - let’s get you fixed up and scav these bastards.” 

She bites her lip and still snorts in his face while she shoots him with med-x and stitches up his forehead, snorts into his chest while she stims his broken ribs and bandages his torso up tight, snorts into her own hand while he cleans and stims the mutant hound bites on her knees, snorts while they strip the bodies and Strong stomps impatiently around them, growling at the waste of hauling anything not meat and insisting he can smell more mutants past the hill. The snorting falls to faint hiccups as they follow the reluctantly burdened Strong toward that stink, and then the occasional deep, satisfied sigh, while he rolls her words around in his head.

_Cave burglar? That could be a video game, and so could Tunnel Snakes, but tube steak?_

She calls a halt near the top of the hill as Strong shrugs off his improvised pack to strategize, and her eyes still dance with juvenile merriment when they meet his, and _Oh…heck._

He barely hears the plan, nodding numbly toward the ground as he receives his usual orders. Get in place, defend her and Strong, keep the now very high Cait from rolling off his perch and getting stepped on, sure, sure, so long as he doesn’t have to look the boss in the eye. So much for his determination to avoid crude sex jokes.

Still, the second she and Strong get into position, the humiliation fades to insignificance, and the three of them blow through this smaller mutant camp like boots stomping cave scum. It’s hardly a fight worth celebrating, certainly not with the gusto Nora uses as she pumps her fists and screams to the sky.

“Tunnel Snakes Rule!”

“Hilarious,” he growls, and would have told her just how hilarious if Strong hadn’t echoed her, bellowing:

“Tunna Snake Rue!”

He buries his face in his hands. “This is going to be a thing, isn’t it.”

“Yes.” She pats the top of his hat. “Yes, it is.”

They stay the night in that camp, back far enough no raiders should see there’s only one actual mutant left, but close to the big fire. Cait’s resting with her head on the boss’ knees while she shivers through the comedown of a jet overdose, and Strong stomps impatiently around the perimeter, hefting his power fist in hope of an attack.

“It was an actual snake on his jacket,” he insists to the boss, and snow wouldn’t melt on her face when she replies that she’s absolutely sure that’s true. She strokes Cait’s hair and hums something soothing, a tune MacCready can almost place. He tries to remember which of the big kids was around when he was still little enough to want a lullaby, and when the boss asks him about growing up “as an honorary, aha, tunnel snake,” he tells her a bit about Little Lamplight, about living off that rank fungus that at least kept them rad-free, about the mutants in the vault behind them, about picking up sniping as he took on defending the front entrance and Murder Pass, how he’d even run the place for three years.

“And you were all just children, alone?” she asks. “How…brave…of you all.”

“Smart,” Strong grunts, having hunkered down to listen halfway through.

“Hey, thanks, Big Green,” MacCready replies to him, since his compliment seems a little more sincere than the boss’s, but the mutant grunts in disagreement.

“Supers smart,” he corrects. “Protect small humans, small humans grow big. Dip in goo, make strong supers.”

MacCready feels his mouth drop open.

“I’ve…been warned by the Brotherhood that mutants target vault dwellers,” the boss tells him, reluctantly. “Low radiation levels, few mutations…the best chance the FEV will take.”

“Smart,” Strong repeats, nodding.

MacCready lets the idea sink in. It was a little strange, maybe, that the supers were so easily kettled in Murder Pass, when they viciously attacked anything else that came near the area. And Big Town had sure been targeted by the muties before the angry vault lady significantly thinned their ranks in the years before he moved there.

Strong heaves himself upright, a heavy hand falling on MacCready’s shoulder. 

“Mack Read Dee make good super,” the mutant assures him.

“No need to rush on that, hey?” MacCready replies weakly. “So, I…actually grew up in a super mutant farm. Huh. This does put my childhood in a different light.”

After several minutes of him staring blankly into the fire, the boss leans over to take his hand. “I’d try to empathise if it would be of some comfort, but I think ‘the day I figured out my mom cheated on dad with her partner and started hating all three of them’ probably doesn’t compare.”

She makes a funny-looking triangle, one arm stretched to him, the other stroking Cait’s back, so he asks, “Are you gonna be my pillow, too, boss?”

She snorts and drops his hand. “I’ve only got so much lap, Mac.”

He rolls his blanket up into a rough pillow, since the fire’s so warm, and curls up facing away from them. He can’t resist an innocent: “Another time, then,” and even when she pokes him in the back, hard, he still doesn’t ask her.

They’re up on the Prydwen when he finally does, feet dangling a mile over the Commonwealth, letting the high icy wind blow the fog of excellent old world bourbon out of their heads. But this is later, after more mutie strongholds are clear, after Strong abruptly announces his intention to walk to the Slog and talk more with “Wise Man” about “Milk of Human Kindness,” whatever that is. After his first, brief ride on a vertibird, his stomach insisting it’s still on the ground while Cait half-shoves him out the side trying to get her hands on the minigun controls, and the boss shouts over the noise of the rotors, “Children, if you can’t behave, I’m turning this car around right now!”

This is after the boss’s awkward reunion with that Paladin, the one that grabs her face without asking and closely examines the healed injuries before demanding an immediate report and what better be a damn good explanation for missing over a month of check-ins.

The boss answers his last question first, her feet shoulder-width apart and hands loosely clasped behind her back: “I infiltrated the enemy base as a distraction while my colleague mined the stronghold’s vulnerable points. After the base was levelled, we mopped up the remaining combatants. Unfortunately, I had not anticipated two of them would be equipped with power armour, and we took injuries that required both external medical assistance and regrettably time-intensive rehab out in the field.”

Danse’s intense stare momentarily flicks to MacCready. “This is your subcontractor?”

“MacCready,” the boss nods.

“You should enlist properly,” Danse tells him. “Our Initiates are provided with far better equipment than that Talon Company trash.”

“I’d like just one man to follow _my_ orders,” the boss interrupts, her voice immediately as hard as she’d used against Preston, back in Sanctuary. “You’ve already got a whole squad of your own, Danse. Don’t even think about poaching mine.”

MacCready plays deaf and mute and breathes carefully, wondering if he can take out the Paladin with a clean headshot, if the boss knows how to deal with the others in power armour surrounding them and pretending not to listen. But Danse lets the insubordination slide with just a warning tilt of his head, and asks for the report on her assignment progress, instead.

Apparently, they’ve gone above and beyond the call of that duty. Danse is pleased and marks off twice as many targets in her pip-boy before loading her down with a small fortune in fusion cells and cores, telling her to check in with him again before she goes.

“Now that’s a man who doesn’t have many friends,” MacCready observes quietly.

“Danse isn’t so bad,” she replies without much conviction. “At least not when you pry him away from his ‘brothers’.”

She makes the rounds of the ship while Cait settles in to pester the newest recruits on the bottom level. MacCready sticks close while she lets a mad scientist fiddle with her pip-boy, removing miniscule blood samples from the inside compartment, when she hands over old-world technical documents and a stack of Grognak comics to another lab-coated jerk, and snarls an obscene refusal at a quartermaster who tries to assign her to commandeer another settlement’s crops and then overcharge her on fusion cores. In fact, she doesn’t treat any of them the way she does her Minutemen, responding with stiff politeness or outright sarcasm to their sharp commands, while they clearly barely tolerate her in return.

Still, it’s an enlightening tour, and if his pockets bulge with fusion cores and ammo by the end, who’s to prove he didn’t bring them on board with him?

An approaching scribe makes her groan, turn on heel to push him into a connecting hallway, and hiss, “Get Cait and meet me at the vertiberd, quick, we’re leaving!”

But she’s too slow. The scribe already has his hand on her elbow. “Initiate Nora, lovely to see you again. Elder Maxson has been made aware of your presence and has cleared time in his busy schedule to debrief you personally. Immediately.”

“I’m honoured, of course,” Nora smiles warmly, her fingers flicking in irritation where she’s automatically clasped them behind her back, and whispers to MacCready once the scribe has impatiently waved her on, “Try not to attract his attention.” 

Maxson seems to savour the rare power of negotiating with the leader of a near-enemy faction who also happens to be his subordinate. Nora, on the other hand, plays her “just a bored vault dweller who can go back underground any time I want” role to the hilt, leavening it with more than a touch of “you are so charming that I can’t help but delight in your presence.” It’s another version of the suit, he thinks, one she’s somehow so accustomed to wearing that she could do up its buttons in her sleep.

Maxson picks the poison and pours three tumblers of good bourbon, surprising MacCready by carrying one to him in his seat by the door, which he just barely remembers to accept with a deep, solemn nod of thanks instead of his usual “about time!” But the boss takes over serving duties after that, solicitously keeping his tumbler topped nearly to the brim (and always by at least twice the amount she adds to her own glass).

When the very young elder gives her form-fitting vault suit a lingering once-over (and MacCready remembers her little shudder as she removed and stowed her combat armour pieces outside Maxson’s office) and compliments her on “the more appropriate choice of attire”, she responds with a disapproving, tight mouthed _hmmm_ that, just for a moment, shifts to a hint of smile as she pointedly examines her fingernails.

MacCready spends the next several minutes focusing quite hard on the image of her sitting in this office many times before, forcing Maxson to negotiate with the Grognak costume. Afterward, he realises he’s entirely missed the description of some strategy that must not suit Nora’s plans, as she responds:

“General, it’s obvious that you’ve put an extraordinarily generous effort into mentoring the subordinate who developed this plan, but you must know you’re doing him or her no kindness in pretending to give it serious consideration.”

Maxson rallies after a moment’s awkward silence, smoothly replying: “Indeed, but where will tomorrow’s leaders come from if today’s aren’t…indulgent.”

Nora smiles, and warmly, at the word “indulgent” and lets the moment draw itself out before changing the subject to his larger plans for the riverside. He wastes several minutes describing the strategies he’d used to clear the centre of D.C., particularly the mall back before it was rechristened “the Warzone” by the local ghoul stronghold, which MacCready knows damn well were actually carried out by the Lyons. He begins to seriously wonder if Maxson’s only making a run at the Commonwealth in order to have fresh ears for this bunk.

“But, I’m getting somewhat off my point, Initiate, which is that I am quite displeased with you.”

The boss’s cool, vaguely anticipatory expression doesn’t waver. “Yes, Elder? I’m certainly distressed to learn that. Where have I gone wrong?”

“You took initiative,” he points at her with the rest of his fingers wrapped around the tumbler. “Which, with you more than any other initiate, I am willing to allow some leeway. But your preemptive strike against the Gunners has now utterly wasted the groundwork I was laying toward an arrangement with that contingent.”

“That’s…certainly regrettable, Elder,” the boss responds slowly. “However, even if I’d been aware of the Brotherhood’s interest, this strike was essential Minutemen action. It couldn’t have been delayed, let alone cancelled.”

“Your conflict of interest is certainly regrettable,” Maxson echoes, regarding her steadily over the rim of his glass.

“If I may, Elder?” MacCready interrupts, trying to imitate the boss’s tone (minus the underlying flirtation). She turns slowly in her chair, her eyes only widening in irritated warning once Maxson can’t catch it. “The Gunners would be terrible allies. They’d only aim to get access to your armoury and turn it against you.”

“He speaks,” Maxson announces to the room, after a pause to frown at the back of the boss’ head, and graces MacCready with a doubtful look. “And may I ask the source of this intelligence?”

“I was one.” MacCready raises his glass to suddenly dry lips, hoping the boss can rescue him from his rescue attempt.

“Espionage isn’t one of your strengths, is it?” the boss asks softly, and he gratefully bows out of the spotlight with a headshake. She continues, turning back to Maxson, “He’s right, though; Gunners are little better than raiders, and an alliance with them would almost certainly lose you the support of the larger populace they prey on. MacCready got me the intel that allowed us to take down that stronghold with a small strike force, intel I’d be happy to share with you should they become an inconvenience to Brotherhood ambitions.”

And he’s invisible again, which he doesn’t exactly mind. He nurses his bourbon, listening to Nora dance and Maxson preen, while the sun drops lower outside and the state room grows stiflingly warm.

As she makes her excuses and stands to leave, Maxson asks about the status of “111”, to which Nora pulls a face and waves her hand like the question’s left a bad smell. “Still adamantly isolationist, I’m afraid. I haven’t even bothered to report in since my last visit went so badly.”

“It is a shame,” Maxson says pointedly, simultaneously holding the door open and standing in the way. “That old-world nuclear stockpile could be put to much better use in service of the Brotherhood’s cause.”

“They are fools,” Nora agrees, sliding past as if doing so doesn’t require brushing against her nominal commander, continuing pointedly. “But I do love them dearly. Goodnight, Elder. It’s been a pleasure, as always.”

He favors her with a shallow bow before calling for his scribe. Nora drops the casual stroll as soon as they’re out of his sight, muttering, “I need some air,” sliding down a ladder rather than taking the time to climb the rungs and marching out the prow’s airlock. 

MacCready follows, catching the pack she throws to him just before leaning over the railing to vomit into the distant sea. He hesitates as she rests her head on the cool metal, then rubs her back.

She startles a little at the contact, then gives him a weak and utterly false smile. “Relax, I’m fine. It’s just that hot airless room, all the bottom-shelf bourbon…it’s a lot better out than in.”

She takes her pack from him and crosses to the other side, shrugging it on her shoulders before sitting by the railing, her feet dangling over the Commonwealth. MacCready fishes a Nuka Cola out of his pack and joins her. She accepts it with a slightly more genuine twist of her lips and rinses her mouth out. They hand the bottle back and forth for a while, turning their faces to the freezing wind with something like relief, and MacCready passes the quiet time trying to locate every target they’ve hit in the city blocks below.

Eventually, he apologises, “I should of kept my mouth shut in there, like you said.”

“Your chivalry was appreciated, but yes,” she shrugs. “I had it under control. Maxson’s nothing compared to the major I worked under for three years. That idiot letch only got promoted taking credit for my work, and he literally chased me around his desk, once. Still, it’s hard to hold a grudge, now.”

After double-checking over his shoulders that they’re the only ones outside the ship, he asks in a low voice, “I thought everyone in your vault was killed.”

“They were,” she replies quietly. “Maxson doesn’t need to know that.”

“Same with the nuclear stockpile?”

She nods. “It’s always better to negotiate from a position of strength. Even if it’s horseshit. I’ve got that vault locked down tight with a pre-war military encryption that even I shouldn’t know, so it’s not like Maxson can just pop in and meet all the friendly corpses for himself.”

MacCready shifts uncomfortably at the reminder of her loss, but forces himself still before she can move to give him room. He’s warm where their shoulders and legs touch.

“Much as he’d love to. Goddamn vault-dweller fetishists. If I had a dollar for every creep who’s marvelled over how ‘healthy’ I am…”

“You’ve got all your teeth,” MacCready shrugs. “It’s hard not to notice, that overall…lack of major damage. Heck, it’s even the first thing I saw. Knew you’d come out of a vault, right off, even without the bright blue oh-shoot-me-now suit.”

She snorts and gives him a sidelong smile. “I thought you were a punk kid, if probably a damn useful one.”

“You know I’m good,” he grins back.

She tilts her head, waggling the bottle in a “maybe so, maybe no” gesture until he bumps her shoulder with his.

And the words are out of his mouth: “I got a favour to ask.”

She’s finishing the last of the cola, and swallows before joking, “If you wanted another sip, too late.”

He shakes his head and, as he tries out a few starts in his head, her face grows serious. “What is it, Mac?”

“Down there,” he points to the west of the city. “There’s this building, Med-Tek Research HQ? I’ve got to get in there, but I need help. There’s certain to be some good scav, lots of medical supplies…but I’ve gotta be honest with you, we’ll probably use up more than we walk out with. If we walk out. And it’ll cut into your Rad-Away supply even worse than we did back at the fort…but there’ll definitely be caps in it for you, just from all the mint-condition equipment. We can break it down into components in there and carry out more that way…”

He trails off in the face of her increasingly confused expression. “Yeah, sorry, I’m telling this all wrong. It’s just…”

He takes a deep breath and wishes for another belt of bourbon. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, but you’ve stuck your neck out anyway. I don’t forget things like that. And I hate to ask for even more, especially when it’s ferals, which you hate, and a lot of them, but you’re the only person I can trust, heck, the only person there’s even a chance will say yes.”

There’s a hand on his back now, rubbing like he’s the one spewing over the rail. “Mac…shut up, ok? Whatever it is, I’ll help. It’s at the top of my to-do list. All right?”

He shakes his head again, gritting his teeth, and decides to just get it over with. Spit it out. “I have a family back in the Capital. My kid…my wife…”

He shivers a little, as all the places that were warm from her abruptly feel the wind, and glances over to see the boss clasp her hands on the railing. She looks at them with an awkward smile. “Sorry, please…don’t let me interrupt.”

“Boss…” he manages, half-reaching for one of those hands, but can’t quite close the distance.

“I’m more sorry for…ah…” she continues, meeting his eyes on the second try, only to scrunch her nose and look back down at the city below. “I hasn’t realised you’re a married man. No one wears rings any more. Of course, I didn’t exactly ask, either.”

“Lucy’s gone,” he says, and there aren’t any other words. That lock’s rusted shut. He clears his throat. “Years ago. And it was just me and Duncan, out there, and…and eventually I ran into an old friend, who’d gotten really hard to find on purpose. And she gave me a job, helping her break old vaults. She wanted to…well, something like your settlements. I can’t really go into it, not at all, definitely not here.”

The boss nods, the awkwardness and confusion in her expression starting to drip away under the onslaught of her strategy face, and he could melt into the metal plating with guilt and relief. She’s going to do it.

“That was good, for a year maybe. Steady work, a home for Duncan, even if it was on the road more often than not, until this one vault. It went deep, and, I swear I’m not lying, it was full of identical whackjobs named Gary. Creepiest day of my life, that same face in my sights again and again.”

“Clones?” she frowns. “It sounds like science fiction, but in my experience…well…what happened?”

He swallows hard. “We found a cache of medical supplies, way back in a hidden lab below the other levels. Really high-grade stuff, super stimpacks, long-lasting buffout, other vials we didn’t recognise but figured…it was probably the same kinda thing. So we brought it up, took it back to the camp…couple of days later, Duncan came down with a nasty fever, and then these blue boils popped out all over his body…”

“Blue boils?” she asks sharply.

“Weird, right?” He takes a shaky breath. “Duncan’s the only one who got sick, even after we went back down, ripped that vault apart. Cracked every terminal, even tore the walls from the rock in that lab looking for a hidden safe, but nothing. No antidote. No cure. Just messages sent between there and Med-Tek up here, gobbledegook she said was testing results. Like the lab up here was working on a cure, and the lab down there was working to beat it. But they hadn’t yet…that was the important thing. And meanwhile Duncan just got weaker and weaker, until he couldn’t even walk, so I had to…I had to leave him behind, to go after that cure.”

“Mac…” the boss is clutching his hand. He hadn’t even felt her take it. “How long have you been up here? Have you had any word, anything about…why didn’t you ask me before?”

There’s already pain around her eyes, her lips already moving soundlessly around something that looks like _so, so sorry_.

“Hey, boss, it’s ok, it’s, uh…he’s not getting any better, but he’s not getting any older, either.” He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to remember an explanation that would have gone over his head even if he’d been in any shape to hear it. “You know what I mean if I say he’s on ice?”

When he opens his eyes, her mouth is tight and uncomfortable like she’s choking down bug meat, but she nods. “Cryopod?”

MacCready shrugs. “Cryo-something. Duncan’s frozen, but she said he’d have nice dreams of the world before the bombs. One of the guys went under with him, so he’d have company.”

He rubs at his eyes and huffs out a humourless laugh. “I sound like a crazy person.”

“No,” the boss says, but it sounds more like she’s talking to herself. “I know at least some of that technology exists, and if it does…why not the rest? Those boils – I wish I could remember.”

“You’ve heard of this sickness?” he asks her, sharper than he means. If there’s a cure somewhere outside that ghoul-infested hellhole…

But she shakes her head. “It was a bit of a legend before the war, well, more like a Halloween story. They were in a crappy holo, ‘The Night Doctors’, I think it was called. Some people were genuinely paranoid that it was a disease made by the Chinese that they’d spread in the states before an invasion, but it was mostly a joke. Calling out of work sick with the blue boils, “Don’t park on lover’s lane with her unless you want a dose of the blue boils”, that sort of thing.”

He gets maybe half of what she’s saying. “So people knew about this in your vault?”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s no help to us now, anyway. Tell me everything you know about this building.”

He tells her about trying to break in on his own, only making it as far as the lobby once, and helps her draw a rough blueprint of what he knows of the three levels in her pip-boy.

“She pulled all the passwords out of the terminal system, so I can get us down all three levels, if we can just deal with the ferals. And that’s a mess. You know a name for something worse than a reaver, worse than those glowing things?”

“Not unless my dying screams can be called a name,” she replies, and continues thoughtfully. “Med-Tek was a subsidiary of Vault-Tek, or maybe it was the other way around?”

“No idea, boss,” he responds, wondering where she’s going with this, but she just stares into the clouds, absently tapping her lips.

“Do you trust me?” she finally asks, which can’t be a good sign.

“With my life,” he replies, even so.

“And with your son’s, too, which…I don’t deserve this,” she says, standing, and goes on before he can argue. “I have a plan. You’ll hate it, but it’s the best shot we have of getting the cure in your hands, and tonight.”

“Boss?” he asks, his throat tight.

“So if you trust me, follow me, and back up everything I say.”

And he does, without hesitation, even when she clomps straight into the officers’ bunks and wakes up Paladin Danse, along with the rest of his shift trying to get some shut-eye. She ignores them, lifting her pip-boy to his blinking face and dropping it before he can possibly read anything on it.

“Paladin, I’ve just received word that a situation we’ve been monitoring in the city has gone critical. It’s too big for the Minutemen to mount an effective response, so I’m requesting Brotherhood intervention.”

“Nora…” the man begins, then: “Initiate, there are procedures to follow, and if you’d care to make a formal report, I would be happy to review it first thing in the morning.”

He hesitates, then finishes: “Before breakfast, even.”

_No_ , MacCready wants to tell the boss. _Don’t do this. Don’t let these creeps anywhere near the building, or they’ll suck up everything in it and take it away to a secret vault and the cure will never get to Duncan…_

“No time,” Nora insists, and flips her pip-boy to show him the map. “Right here, this building was a pre-war experimental medical facility and is now a major source of radiation in the area. This has attracted a number of feral ghouls to take up residence. Between the radiation itself and the remnants of pre-war chemical and nuclear experimentation, these ghouls have mutated into much more severe threats, ones which have resulted in increasing loss of life in the immediate area.”

“Initiate, I do agree that this is a target to place high in our extermination rota, but fail to see the urgency that requires I be woken in the middle of the night?”

There’s a general grumble of agreement from his fellow officers.

“That’s far from the worst of it,” the boss tells him. “Before the war, the bottom laboratory level was rigged to blow as a last-ditch defence against espionage. It’s the source of the radiation. And from the major spike that’s been detected by a one of our trade posts not far away, either the ghouls have somehow tampered with it or it’s just lost stability, but it will definitely blow if we don’t get in there and defuse it. If we even still can.”

Danse gets to his feet, along with several other officers. “I apologise for my earlier refusal, Nora – I should know by now to trust your instincts. I’ll assemble a team – ”

_No…boss, don’t let him…_

“I’ll need to borrow some power armour,” Nora interrupts. “And, Danse, you’ll have to let Mac and me take point throughout the mission. With that lowest level, especially, it is absolutely essential no one enter until we’ve given the all-clear.”

“This is a Brotherhood operation,” Danse tells her sternly, stepping into his power suit. “You two aren’t even on my shortlist to join the strike team, let alone lead the infiltration.”

“Really, Danse?” Nora snaps, following him into the hallway, MacCready chasing them both and biting his lips, frantically repeating to himself _the boss knows what she’s doing, the boss knows what she’s doing, trust the boss…_ “You have a surplus of vault dwellers on this ship?”

Danse pauses, then cautiously asks over his shoulder, “You said this was a medical research facility, not a vault.”

“Med-Tek? Vault-Tek? Anything jumping out at you, there?” She raises her eyebrows and lifts her hands in exaggerated confusion. “Same company, different branches.”

Danse grunts an unwilling affirmative. “And, as such, you’re automatically the expert?”

She hooks a thumb toward MacCready. “He can get us through the security terminals on each floor. One of us should be able to defuse the detonator.”

“Excellent,” Danse nods. “Debrief the team on how to do both, and let the experts handle this.”

“I’m not letting any of you idiots barge down there – ” MacCready snarls.

“We’ve got no intel on what kind of rig we’ll be dealing with,” the boss interrupts. “I don’t have time to teach your people how to recognise the five or so versions I’ve encountered, let alone how to handle each one, and Mac here’s got experience with twice as many.”

“But – ” Danse begins.

“You’ve got your expertise right here,” Nora bowls over him. “What you don’t have is another damn minute to waste.”

MacCready’s got to hand it to the Paladin; when he’s beat, he doesn’t waste time fighting it. He calls back to the now wide-awake officers, asking if someone could kindly prepare a goddamned report to pass up to the Elder while he actually deals with this shitstorm, and points to a handful of Initiates as they clump back up through the ship to the vertibird platform, shouting orders. One of them hops out of her power armour so the boss can step in.

She points at MacCready again. “Any chance of a set for him, too? It’s going to get hot down there.”

“No,” Danse snaps back, then relents at her glare. “But he can borrow an undersuit, they’re lead-lined. Will that be acceptable, Commander _Initiate_?”

Danse snatches the suit from a locker as they pass and throws it to MacCready, the hard clomps of his feet easing off a little at the boss’s soft “Thank you, Danse.”

Minutes later, MacCready changes in the vertiberd, hopping on one leg as it lifts and rolls, telling himself it’d be far too embarrassing to live through a mile-long plummet in his skivvies. There’s a helmet clamped on his head so he can hear Danse shout the plan to the rest of the small team over the roar of the rotors, while the boss seems absorbed in her pip-boy, transmitting his rough blueprint to the visualizers in their helmets. As they loop over the target, scouting for a landing spot, she leans over to help him with the last buckles on his chest piece and shouts into his ear: “Ready?”

“Born ready!” he shouts back, keeping his actual opinion behind his teeth. If they pull this off, he won’t care, and if it goes pear-shaped, he’ll make sure she regrets it…though he suspects she wouldn’t need him for that. “You?”

“No!” she shouts back. “But at least no one will know if I piss myself in this thing!”

He laughs despite himself, despite the giant knot all his organs have rolled into, and clomps her helmet with a closed fist before pulling his jacket on over the new gear and stowing the borrowed helmet.

“Ferals down below!” the pilot shouts, and Danse yells at the boss to take the minigun. The rest of them lean out the open sides, watching as she tears through ghoul and plaza concrete alike, clearing in minutes what previously took him hours sniping from the parking garage across the street.

They jump with the strike team, leaving the pilot and a guard to land and clean up any wounded ferals, setting up watch for their return. Inside the lobby, it’s like he made no dent on his last attempt. They’re immediately swarmed, and he’s reminded of Nora’s speech to the Gunners, so long ago, as the fresh Initiates spray walls and furniture with more laser blasts than ghouls.

All he can do is stick close to the boss, using her armour as a shield from ghoul and ally alike. He’s used to how she moves, at least, ducking under her arm just as she swings back, sliding around to her front as friendly fire pew-pews past her, then back around again as a fresh wave of ferals pours from the balcony above.

And, reluctantly, he has to give Danse credit, too, as the man quickly picks up their pattern and moves with them. He keeps close to Nora, but always leaves a space for MacCready to slip through. The two of them aim for legs, crippling shots, and push forward, trusting MacCready’s fast hands to finish the ferals off with Shooty as soon as they tumble low. Between the two of them, MacCready’s only shot a couple of times by their own team and lightly savaged by the ferals on the first floor. He’ll be a mess of bruises underneath the sturdy suit, but his skin’s still in one piece so far.

One the floor is cleared, he runs to the terminal by the elevator. The passwords are on a piece of paper, under the suit, but he memorised all of them months ago. An Initiate whistles when the door beeps open and slaps him on the shoulder, apparently believing MacCready cracked the high-level encryption in a dozen keystrokes. They crowd into the lift, the boss muttering something about weight limits that MacCready can’t make out over the noise of being crushed to death between four sets of power armour, and then it’s back into the maelstrom.

It’s the speed he can’t believe, even as his legs start to shake with fatigue from ducking and dashing and crouching, as even more friendly lasers warm his back and teeth start to penetrate the tough suit. There’s dozens of them, far too many to keep count, most of them moving in a wavery haze of radioactive heat, and they keep going down. Even when they turn the corner and nearly walk into two glowing things, the boss just shoves him between her and the wall before they blow, and then those two go down, too. There’s another corner, and another terminal, the second password on his fingertips, and…

They’re through. The Initiates are ordered to hold at the entrance, while the boss and Danse take on the last, hardest combatants, MacCready’s bullets barely a distraction to the hideous things, and then, unbelievably, they’re down too, and the boss is yelling at Danse to _get back, goddammit, let us work_ , and he’s entering that last password with trembling fingers. It’s been months, nearly a year, in the Commonwealth, and only the last thirty minutes of it meant a damn thing in getting to this goal.

They almost jam together in the doorway, trying to push through at the same time, and the boss’s pip-boy is tick-tick-ticking in disapproval as they split up to search the lab, automatically pocketing every scrap of medication. She yells happily, once, but when he looks over with his heart trying to beat somewhere up in his eyeballs, she’s only pointing at the inside of a refrigerator, at the bright light and cold bottles inside.

“Just a working refrigerator,” she says, taking off her helmet so he can see her apologetic wince. “The first I’ve seen.”

“Keep looking,” he orders in a tight voice, and less than a minute later sees the strange syringes, long and fat and…all broken? Shards cut his fingers as he frantically picks up the mess, trying to find one, just one…

“Mac!”

And she’s on her plated belly, reaching under a lap table to a far corner, trying to angle the light from her pip-boy as she gently reaches under…

…and pulls out another fat syringe, blessedly whole, and reads from its side: “Prevent?”

He snatches it from her and just looks at it, looks at it sitting in his hand, until she’s on her feet and handing him a thick oven mitt from beside the bunsen burner, which he carefully wraps around the single precious dose, and then one of their lunchboxes so he can tuck it deep in a bed of Rad-Away. She puts it in his pack, where he’d swear it burns a warm glow into his back.

Her pip-boy’s still ticking, louder than ever, and the strike team’s not going to wait long, and it could still blow this whole plot when they learn there’s no detonator, but when she presses her lips to his he’s completely taken by surprise, even though he’s somehow tipped up on his toes to compensate for the extra height of the suit, tilted his chin to reach past the high ridge of its torso, and gotten his hand exactly into the little space between it and her to grab that loosely tied hair at the back of her neck. He holds tight to it like a drowning man, crushed between the table behind him and the plates of her suit, probably cutting her skin with those gold bands in the leather that tangles between his fingers, anything to keep those lips tight against his.

Soon, too soon, she’s escaped, only a flash of triumphant grin before she’s using the suit’s strength to yank the working refrigerator away from the wall, jamming a scalpel into the works in the back to make a dangerous-sounding rattle. While she pushes it back to the wall and punches off the front handle, he’s got his pack open, then the lunchbox, then the mitt, and touches that fat syringe again.

“Help me with this,” she orders, and he tucks it all away again, then takes one end of the heavy table she wants to move against the refrigerator.

“All clear!” she bellows as they move a second table into place, blocking access to the fridge. When the troops pile in, she raises her arms yelling, “Woah, woah, woah, step gently. Big bomb here, yes?”

She points to the ominously rattling fridge.

Danse comes closer – carefully – stopping at the table perimeter she’s established, and asks doubtfully. “In there?”

“Well, the detonator,” she shrugs. “The actual reactor it’s attached to is sunk below the floor.”

“Camouflage,” MacCready pipes up. “Once, we found the trigger point behind a toilet. That was an unpleasant crack.”

The boss turns and ducks, as if she’s carefully examining the refrigerator seals from underneath the table and definitely not hiding the scrunched face of someone coming off a long battle high and desperately choking back inappropriate, scam-breaking laughter.

“I should probably get topside before I grow an extra head,” MacCready tells no one in particular, sidling toward the door.

The boss coughs, hard, and stands. “I’ll join you. Paladin, we’ve reset the trigger so it should hold long enough to get anything useful from the building, but if you want my advice, bury the bottom basement floors in concrete afterward. It’ll just keep radiating the entire block, otherwise.”

Danse nods and tells the initiates to start clearing out anything of value, then follows them out to the lobby, muttering a terse report of the mission into his helmet microphone. MacCready resists – barely – the impulse to check again that the medicine is still where he left it, hardly noticing when the paladin shifts from his report to congratulations on a successful mission, suggesting again that MacCready stop wasting his damn time and properly enlist.

“Hire your own partner,” the boss teases Danse, with more than a little serious edge. “If you’re so happy with us, how about a lift to Sanctuary, huh? Give the locals a little thrill?”

“You have commandeered enough Brotherhood resources for one night, Initiate,” Danse warns sternly. “And give Jenkins back her suit.”

The boss laughs then, too hard for a little friendly repartee, but Danse only chuckles in response as she steps back out of the suit, thanking their pilot for the loan. “Nearly forty hostiles, by my count, and no causalities. An excellent night’s work, Initiate. Now that I know what you’re capable of, expect future assignments to reflect your true ability.”

The boss groans and takes MacCready’s elbow, firing off a salute that degrades into a wave. “We need to go before this ends in a promotion. Or worse, another bottle’s worth of Maxson’s personal debriefing.”

He manages a nod and pulls them east when she tries to turn north. Once they’re out of the vertiberd’s sightline, he slows down and gets his rifle up. They’ve previously cleared most of the raiders out of the nearby area, but there’s surely more ferals to deal with. Maybe even super mutants, but they’ve gotten good at…

_Wait_ , he thinks, and then whispers, “We left Cait behind!”

“It’s ok,” the boss replies. “They’ll kick her out when she makes a pest of herself. In any case, I want her to spend some time up there. Danse would sponsor her in a heartbeat, if she wasn’t addicted to…everything…so maybe a couple days drooling over all the shiny guns she could be playing with will motivate her to ask for help there.”

“Oh,” MacCready says, hoping she’s wrong. Cait’s halfway to a friend after this last week, and he’d hate to lose her to those fascists. 

He places his feet carefully. It’s all too easy to picture, rubble shifting, a stupid fall, and then, crack, the last vial of medication…

“Here,” he says, digging the lunchbox out of his pack and handing it to Nora. “You carry it.”

“Sure,” she replies slowly, and makes a point of wrapping the lunchbox up in her blanket before she stows it, another cushioning layer. MacCready nods his thanks at the gesture and starts off again.

“Mac?” she stops him, after three blocks. “Where are we going?”

“Goodneighbor,” he says. “Daisy. Her caravan contacts can get this down to a merchant in the Capital.”

They both turn their heads at distant gunfire and move together into the shelter of a wrecked diner.

“It could be faster,” the boss starts. “Give me a couple days to think, and I could maybe swing a vertiberd trip for you down to the Capital. You don’t have to ride with a caravan.”

“I’m not going,” he tells her.

“Mac…I appreciate the loyalty, but…this is your son.” She takes his elbow again, slides her hand up to his shoulder. “When his eyes open, he’s going to see you, and you’re going to hold him for the first time in…what, months? He’ll be so cold, just out of cryo. He’ll need that.”

She rubs her eyes, but not quick enough to catch the two tears that streak her grimed cheeks, and he wants to kiss her again. But the image he paints tears at him too badly, and he only says, “I can’t.”

“Don’t you even,” she starts.

“I don’t know where he is,” he tells her. “Not exactly. Definitely a vault, and in the capital, but I don’t have the clearance. Daisy can get it to Canterbury, and since the traders there worship the ground my friend spits on, they’ll put it in her hands, but if I came with it…no. That was the deal – she would keep Duncan safe, but she wouldn’t compromise security.”

The boss looks at him like he’s confessed to poisoning Sanctuary’s water supply, but only asks, “Do you trust your friend that much?”

A question he’s tried very hard not to think about. “Well, she’s, uh, she’s done some pretty horrible things. Especially when she was still a Paladin, all ‘ends justify the means,’ you know? And she’d still put a bullet in you easy as breathing if you got on the wrong side of her sense of justice…”

The boss’s eyebrows have nearly reached her hairline before he decides to just sum up: “It’s complicated. But a little kid, no. She’d never let a little kid get hurt. Not even if he cursed her out and got in the way of saving her own family.”

The gunfire faded minutes ago, and he looks out at the street longingly. “Can we get moving, boss?”

It’s not a long walk to Goodneighbor, even backtracking to detour around threats they’d usually run toward, already counting their caps from the scav. They can make it by dawn, easy. But that’s still a lot of hours through enemy territory, where one lucky shot…one bad fall, like the boss nearly takes sliding badly down the side of a tipped bus…

“Mac,” she grouses when he grabs her arm, nearly tipping her over again, “If you don’t breathe a little, you’re going to pass out. And if I have to drag you the rest of the way, I’m definitely finding someone who can tattoo “Tunnel Snakes Rule” on your forehead before you wake up.”

“It’s just – ”

“I know. We’ll get there.”

Daisy’s opening the store when they do, arranging the low-value junk on her counter just so, and greets him with an appalled, “MacCready…you didn’t enlist. Did you?”

He looks down at the Brotherhood insignia on his undersuit (and pictures the look on anyone’s face back home, catching him in both Steel and Talon colors), and reassures her. “It’s all stolen.”

“You don’t have anything against hot Brotherhood gear, do you?” the boss asks her, setting down her suspiciously full pack and removing some laser pistols along with the lunchbox. “Hypothetically speaking?”

“I got it, Daisy,” MacCready says, pointing to the lunchbox. “I got the cure.”

The boss raises an eyebrow at him, but before he can even try to answer her implied _You asked_ Daisy _before me?_ , the old woman is already around the counter and smothering him, hated Brotherhood outfit or no. “Oh my god, that’s wonderful – how’d you ever get past all those ferals? They chewed you to bits, last time.”

He jerks his head at the boss, and the grin splitting his face is almost painful, stretching muscles he hasn’t used in months. “She got me through.”

Daisy takes her hand with a matching smile. “Of course, our Silver Shroud, the lady out of time.”

The boss’ eyes widen and she shakes her head a little. “Don’t blow my secret identify, Daisy.”

Daisy releases them both and pulls a hand-sketched calendar from underneath the counter, running a rough fingertip down the page. “I can get this out tomorrow. Mo owes me a favor, and she’s reliable.”

MacCready opens the lunchbox and gingerly picks up the syringe, just feeling the heft, the solidity of it one more time, while the boss asks, “How much to ship it down? Express, if we can?”

Daisy shakes her head. “It’s on me. I owe this kid a good turn or two.”

It wasn’t much, he could tell the boss. Daisy just hired him for guard duty through a rash of robberies, and one got particularly ugly. The old woman bought him a few rounds in the Rail as thanks, an act of kindness that had him confessing his troubles halfway into the bottle. More amazing was that the moment of weakness hadn’t come back to bite him, for once.

But she’s too busy, dumping the Rad-Away loose into her bag and tucking the syringe back into the oven mitt, even wasting ten caps on that useless old world currency to pack around it. She closes the lid and frowns at it for a moment before adding a roll of duct tape to the bill and completely wrapping up the lunchbox. 

MacCready can only imagine the big ghoul’s expressive grunt when he’s inevitably the one stuck tearing through that mess. Daisy watches the production with a hand over her mouth, a pointedly bland expression that reminds him – 

“Wait.” It’s still there, rolled up in a forgotten pocket: the kid’s baseball cap Mama Murphy said he should keep. “Can you send this with it?”

“Now you’re taking advantage,” she rasps good-naturedly, and ties it to the taped-up box with a piece of old twine. “Now, if you’ve got any actual business to transact…”

He hands the boss his bag and goes out into the courtyard, crashing down on a bench to watch the sky get lighter. A drifter settles down next to him, one of the Third Rail regulars he should know, and he watches MacCready push his hat back and run his hands through his sweaty hair until it probably stands on end.

“Look like you could use this,” the ghoul rasps, tapping a cigarette from his pack. “Bad night?”

“No,” MacCready says, lighting it off the end of the other man’s rollup. “The best.”

The ghoul laughs harshly, ending on a lung-rattling cough. “That’s even worse.”

He feels light enough to drift off with the smoke. The only driving force he’s had for months, that lab he couldn’t get a single step closer to cracking no matter where he put his foot…in a night, it’s done. He’s got to trust so many people now, just getting it to Duncan, trust that the angry vault lady wasn’t lying when she insisted the mad scientists hadn’t pushed the virus past what Med-Tek could cure, trust her to get Duncan back to him. 

And right now, he feels like he can do that.

He watches Nora and Daisy dicker, catches a snatch of conversation as the boss lifts a laser pistol – “quality craftsmanship!” – and Daisy responds with something that sounds suspiciously like “I got your quality craftsmanship right here”, but in the end she slides a fusion core across the counter even though MacCready knows there wasn’t anything in their bags worth 400 caps together.

_Another bad job for her_. The thought dampens his high spirits a little. _Lost time and ammo she could’ve been using to get closer to her own kid._

You wouldn’t guess it, to see her. When she hands MacCready his much lighter pack, that deep frown line between her eyebrows that was just part of her face, it’s gone. He offers her a drag on his cigarette, and instead of taking it she turns his hand to her face and it’d be a pretty picture, eyelashes fluttering shut over his fingers as she inhales, if she didn’t choke and gag and, after he’s smacked her on the back, admit in a wheeze that she hasn’t smoked since college.

“I suppose that’s a skill one loses with age,” she coughs, through that Super Duper Market housewife smile, and takes his arm again. He hands the stub back to the drifter, who casually crams it in the corner of his mouth with the other one, and they stroll through the trash-strewn alley toward the Rail like some bizarre old-world couple with her hand tucked in his elbow.

“We did it,” she grins, once she can finally get an unbroken breath in. This close, when she smiles, he sees the little lines at the corners of her dark eyes, the fine scar from Doc Weathers that nearly touches them, and thinks that she’ll still be pretty when they get deeper. She’s got that bony kind of face that never changes much.

“Yeah,” he says. “We did – you did. I was practically just along for the ride. No one’s ever done anything like this for me before. I swear, I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way to pay you back.”

She just smiles again and teases, like it doesn’t matter if he means it or not, “You kill all the sea monsters from here on out, and we’re even.”

She doesn’t let go of his elbow when he turns, only tightens her grip, so his arm’s trapped between them when he kisses her, and they’re both off balance on the broken pavement. He reaches for her instead of steadying them, catching his fingers in her hair to pull her tighter, and he didn’t get a breath in first and there’s a very real risk he’s entirely forgotten how to do this. She steps back, wobbling on a loose brick, and he follows, refusing to let go of the feel of her lips on his, the smell of her skin where he’s smashing his nose into her cheekbone, and when that hand on his arm gets tighter and pushes him back, hard, into the wall behind him, he can only think, _I deserved that_ and try to get enough air into his lungs to apologise.

But there’s no time for that, and no point either, not when she presses against him, her lips warm and gentle against his cheek, pressing chaste, dry kisses down to his jaw while her hands fumble with the suit fastenings at his waist.


	12. Chapter 12

There’s no way he’s gotten this lucky. Terrified of breaking whatever spell’s holding them together, he gets his hands around her back and keeps them there, letting her nudge his head higher to get at the sensitive skin of his neck. Her lips are delicate, almost tentative, her rapid breaths tickling until he shivers, but her hands are impatient, frustrated by the unfamiliar zipper. She presses close to him but he can’t feel much of her, just the grind of their chest plates; even so, when she gives up on the fastening and slides a warm leg between his, pressing her thigh into the place every drop of blood in his body is rushing to meet, it’s close to too much.

He ducks his head and catches her lips again, and he could happily live in that wind tunnel of an alley forever so long as she’s there, pressing insistently closer and gently nipping his bottom lip, whispering that she needs to feel him. His brain obligingly pulls the catalogue of every time she patched him up, the firm professional grips and accidental brushes, molding them instead into demanding fingers clutching him tighter, and he could reach down and give her all the help she needs getting into his suit, right there against the wall.

But that wind is freezing, he’s pretty sure anyone out early on the main street’s getting an eyeful, there’s no bodily events that have taken place in this alley that he wants hers anywhere near, and worst of all when he slides a hand back around her hip and between them, he finds that some sadist designed women’s vault suits with a long zipper down to the waist, worse than a chastity belt buried under her jacket and combat plates, so he whispers, “Not here.”

He takes her frustrated groan and the thump of her forehead on his shoulder as agreement and wracks his brain for options. His back pay surely went into that fusion core – and he doesn’t begrudge her a cap there after all she’s done, for damn sure – so the hotel’s out. His old flop in the rooms above the Rail is almost certainly gone by now, and this time of day plagued by snoring drifters anyway.

She turns her head to murmur in his ear, in that Super Duper Market housewife voice he will suddenly never, ever get sick of, “I really quite urgently need to know the look on your face when you come.”

“You keep talking like that, and you’ll find out a hell of a lot faster than either of us wants.” He swallows hard, and just as he’s decided to take a shot at throwing Hancock out of his own office for twenty minutes, the boss pulls away and backtracks to a door near the street, attacking its lock with a bobby pin. Her voice breaks as she names the first pin that snaps “son of a bitch” and the second “motherfucking traitor.” He leans against the door between her and the street, making a shadow for her to lurk in, his posture as casual as he can manage with both hands fisted in the pockets of his jacket, attempting to hide the erection of the century.

There’s a click behind him, and the door opens so quickly he half falls through, letting it slam behind them. Best he can see in the gloom, there’s boxes piled up and a dusty, mud-tracked floor; he’s pretty sure it’s a Triggermen warehouse and they practically announced it to the neighbourhood watch when they broke in, but he doesn’t say a word of this when Nora is unbuckling her plates and letting them scatter and bounce across the floorboards, letting him pull down that long, shockingly loud zipper and pin her against one of those piles, letting him run a shaking hand down the bare line of her side until it reaches her underwear. 

She wiggles out of the top of her jumpsuit, and her arms are bare around his neck when he hesitates and she whispers hoarsely, “Mac, that feels like a gorgeously hard cock you’re hiding under there, and I really, really, want to find out if it feels as good inside me as I’ve imagined.”

He can only nod, mute as the village idiot again, as he undoes the zip with nerveless fingers, bracing himself against the boxes with a hand on either side of her as she impatiently pushes the pants further down his hips and wraps her fingers around him, humming into his neck. He stops her when the increasingly confident strokes threaten to buckle his legs and takes off his jacket, intending to put it between her and the cold floor, but she takes it from him.

“You’ll wreck your knees,” she says and pushes hard on the box behind her, toppling it with a crash and covering the remaining waist-high box with his jacket instead.

“This is why you’re the boss,” he chuckles breathlessly, but catches her arm when she bends over the box, spreading her legs as wide as she can with the jumpsuit tangled around her knees, and whispers, “I want to see you.”

There’s more than a little surprise in the smile that earns him, and a softness in her tone that wasn’t there before when she tries to reassure him, “I do like it that way, too,” but she doesn’t protest when he lifts her to sit on the box and struggles with the laces of her boot, resting his head on her bare thigh.

She pushes his hand away, but gently, and yanks the boot off in one pull that makes her ankle pop. “C’mere.”

He ignores the command while she struggles with the leg of her jumpsuit, touching her through her underwear, slowly rubbing a knuckle at the crux of her while his thumb traces the wetness that’s already worked through the fabric, and tries to breathe around the heart hammering in his throat. But as soon as she’s got her foot free, her legs wrap around him and she repeats herself more insistently, “C’mere, Mac.”

There’s something like concern in her eyes when he rises to meet her, and she takes his face in her hands and kisses him slowly, almost sweetly, like the shy hesitant girl he doubts she ever was, and whispers, “You here with me? We don’t have to, if…”

“Always with you, boss,” he interrupts her, then winces at the automatic title, trying to correct himself, “…Nora.”

It sounds stilted in his ears, but there’s an arm around his neck pulling him closer and her hand’s wrapped around him again. He pushes her underwear to the side and lets her guide him into place, determined to ease in slowly, to savor sinking into her, to watch her face change as they connect, but at the first taste of warmth his hips snap forward hard.

There’s a note of surprised pain in her groan, but before he can do more than flush with the beginnings of shame, she nips at his collarbone, making him jump, and licks at the sore place it left. He pulls back and tentatively pushes in again, slower and deeper, a low moan rumbling deep in his chest at the feel of her tightening around him. She’s bracing herself up on both arms but her legs are tight around him again, heels digging into his thighs, and she stretches to reach his neck, to bite again, harder, and whispers, “Don’t stop.”

The box scrapes the floor beneath them as they find a rhythm, fast and hard. He tries again, _Nora_ , and it’s more natural now with her mouth panting against his neck, the mound of her breast under his hand. She whispers in his ear that she wants to taste that beautiful cock, wants to suck him until he begs to come, and he can only groan her name in response, again and again. He wants to tell her that he loves her smirking at the world in that ridiculous costume, loves that she would burn it all down to get one step closer to her son, loves that he’s the one she’s picked to share her road with, pours all of that into her with his last hard thrusts as his body races ahead of his good intentions all over again.

He rests his face on her heaving chest, gulping in air, eyes squeezed tightly shut. But she only shifts her weight to one elbow and gently runs her fingers through his hair, stroking his forehead with her thumb, seemingly nowhere near as pissed as she should be.

“Sorry, Nor,” he mutters as soon as he’s able to speak. “Didn’t mean to…it won’t happen again.”

She only laughs, and there’s no anger in it, only a strange note of…relief? She gets her hand under his chin and nudges until he opens his eyes, looks up at her, and it’s not the death glare a woman gives the guy who’s risked knocking her up like some kinda raider. It’s more the look a heartsick guy gets from his girl when he’s done all the right things to get out of the doghouse.

“If you’re so broken up about it,” she says with a mischievous smirk, “don’t apologise. Fix it.”

His confused expression just sets her off again, those obnoxious little snorts, but he gets her meaning when she takes his hand and moves it down where they’re still joined, covering his thumb with hers, and…yeah. Shit. It has been too damn long, if he was thinking so hard about her that he forgot all about her. And if that’s what she’s more concerned about right now, he owes her big.

At first, she moves his thumb for him, rolling that little bundle of nerves harder than he would have. He stays inside as long as he can manage, shivering when she tightens around his oversensitive cock, thinking _next time, next time_ , hoping against all logic that there’ll be a next time. She murmurs approval when he has to pull out and immediately replaces it with a couple of fingers, rubbing with the same rhythm she’s set for his thumb, and lets his hand go, lying back on the box with her eyes fluttering closed.

It’s weirdly soothing, keeping up that rhythm she set, her hips moving like he’s still fucking her, like she’s got all the time in the world. Her bra’s askew from earlier, and even though it’d be impossible in the dark room, he thinks he can see the marks of his fingers on her, squeezing almost hard enough to bruise when that selfish orgasm shook through him. He leans over and gently kisses her nipple, then, encouraged by the pleased moan that elicits, he runs his tongue along the line of her breast. She arches against him when he settles his mouth on her, sucking on her nipple a little harder than he thinks he should, but she only groans, “Yeah…like that…like that…”

She grinds down on his fingers, and his hips are moving with hers when she whispers to use his teeth, to push harder, and he’d be calling her boss again if his mouth wasn’t far too busy and his attention almost entirely on her hand at her other breast, pinching and rolling her nipple, until she shivers and groans and clenches around his fingers and he immediately rearranges his life goals so _make her do that while I’m fucking her_ is at the very top and underlined twice.

She catches both of his hands in hers, interlaces their fingers, and stretches, pulling him to lay over her as she shivers again, this time probably from the chill of the warehouse on her sweaty skin. Her long, slow sigh blows against his nose and she murmurs, “That was surprisingly good.”

He raises his head just enough to show her a sharp raised eyebrow, _surprisingly?_ , and she laughs and rushes to say, “No, it all felt good, that wasn’t a surprise. It just suddenly…clicked…and it’s been too damn long since I felt _that_ good.”

She shivers again and he shifts to cover more of her, and he’d suggest she get dressed except she tells him to knock that smug grin off his face – and she’s right, he can feel it breaking his face in half, but couldn’t put on another expression even if he wanted to – and tries to kiss it off him, and then there’s just the taste of her, the slide of her tongue along his, the gun-calloused hand gently rubbing his cock back to life, and just as he pulls his mouth free to suggest they give it another go, he’s interrupted by the loud ratchet of a combat shotgun and the barrel pressing against the back of his head.


	13. Chapter 13

Her hand’s immediately on his arm, holding him down as if he hasn’t already frozen solid, and somehow what comes out of her mouth is a polite, if slightly affronted, “May I help you gentlemen?”

There’s a pause and general shifting of feet behind him – four feet, he thinks, two men – until one of them finds his testicles and snarls, “You’re that vault lady, right?”

“I’m _a_ vault lady, yes,” she replies, cool as if they’re unwanted salesmen with a foot jammed in her quarters door.

“Then I think you know this ain’t no vault,” the man behind him snaps. “So why the fuck are you two in our warehouse, vault lady?”

Nora raises an eyebrow and pointedly glances down at her dishevelled state. “I’d say that’s rather obvious, wouldn’t you?”

He shifts closer to her and risks turning his head, slowly, catching pinstripes and a tommy gun out of the corner of his eye. That thug – another ghoul he half-recognises from the Third Rail – leans over to get a better look at him and grunts in frustration, pointing his tommy gun at the ceiling.

“Vault lady _and_ MacCready, of fucking course.” He points at them and tells the man behind MacCready. “They’re both in Hancock’s pocket.”

“Well ain’t this a fine clusterfuck,” the other man snarls. “We whack you two, and Hancock’s got his excuse to go to war.”

The ghoul kicks a box and slings his gun. “I’m gettin’ Hancock. His friends, his problem. You keep them on ice.”

He slams the door behind him, opening it to shout back at them, “And you scratched the lock breaking in – that was new last week, y’mooks!”

The other man lifts his shotgun from MacCready’s head and steps around to cover them both.

“Do you mind if I get dressed while we wait?” Nora asks, raising a thin, polite smile. “I imagine, at this time of day, your colleague will be some time rousing John, and it is rather chilly.”

He jerks his shotgun in a vaguely affirmative gesture, and earns a grudging point or two in MacCready’s estimation for watching her no closer than he has to while they dress, even kicking the pieces of her amour over to her and letting her open her bag to pack them away. She plays it cool, leaving her guns where she dropped them, keeping her hands in the open, letting the tension notch itself down despite the shotgun casually shifting between them.

She’s untangling the laces on her boot when Hancock finally makes his entrance, holding his head and growling at the other ghoul – no words, just a steady, unbroken rumble bubbling up from his chest – while the triggerman insists there’s gotta be some kinda reckoning for this kinda shenanigan. Hancock angrily flicks on the light as the door shuts behind him and stops dead, staring at the boss like she’s brandishing the severed heads of her enemies instead of ramming her foot into a boot.

“Silver!” he exclaims, wincing at his own volume. 

“Hi John.” She gives him a little wave and ties her laces. Her hair’s mostly come loose, wildly framing her flushed face.

“Of all the idiots I’d expect to drag me out of a sound coma at an hour that only happens to other people…you’d be next to last.” He rubs his eyes and bites back a yawn. “What the hell are you up to, breaking and entering in my town?”

The boss just grins back at him with those swollen lips and practically sings out, “The Silver Shroud cannot be restrained by petty laws in the pursuit of evildoers.”

“Evildoers?” Hancock asks, flicking a look at the impatiently shifting triggermen.

She shrugs and stage whispers, “The evildoers were in his pants, John.”

MacCready tries to will the blood back out of his face as all eyes turn toward him, except for Hancock. The mayor just rubs his face again, harder, before giving up with a rusty chuckle. “Sil…you’re killing me here, Sil.”

He swings his hand to point at MacCready. “And you! …actually, this is pretty much what I expect of you, MacCready. Way to stick your level.”

He pauses and takes an exaggerated look at the boss, who’s freed the rest of her hair from the leather tie, corralling it all back into a bun again. “Although I am impressed at how rapidly you’ve come up in the world since the last time. Kudos, brother. Kudos.”

“Shut up, Hancock,” MacCready orders, feeling his face flush even hotter as Nora gives him a curious look.

“And if you’d like to stay at such lofty heights, don’t be too proud to come to your old pal for some more friendly advice.”

“Shut _up_ , Hancock,” MacCready repeats through clenched teeth.

“Hancock,” one of the triggermen interrupts. “We gotta be compensated here. These palookas think they can just waltz right into our shop – ”

“And I’m sure if I crack open these boxes, I’ll find nothing but bona fide hardware cushioned in receipts, yeah?” Hancock shows them his teeth in a hard little smile. “And we’ll all get to sail on nice and smooth like we have so far, no little dust-ups to interrupt legitimate business?”

The triggermen share a resentful glance, and the ghoul finally grumbles. “She scratched the lock. I just got it replaced, 30 caps, brand new.”

“Then she did you the favour of proving you should’ve bought a better one. Now get out, both of you!”

“This is our joint!” one of them protests, but the other, knowing when he’s beat, pushes him out the door.

The boss picks up her guns and tucks them in her pack, capping them off with her army helmet. Hancock watches her, shaking his head.

“Hotel Rex. Maybe three minutes’ walk that way. Just past my bar. Any of this ringing a bell or two in that thick skull? I don’t need this kinda aggravation in my town just because you get the urge to swim upsteam.”

“Hey,” MacCready starts, but the boss shakes her head, then her jacket when she picks it up off the dirty floor.

“Couldn’t wait three minutes, John,” she tells him cheerfully. “And anyway, I’m broke. Crimefighting doesn’t pay. Could we borrow your office instead? He used to be a mayor, too, after all.”

Hancock shoots MacCready an old-fashioned look and digs through his pockets, handing him whatever he comes up with. MacCready’s left with 12 caps, an ampule of jet, a half-empty box of mentants, and a yo-yo with _zoooom!_ on the side in faded red paint when Hancock jerks his head at the door.

“Out. And if either of you get me outta bed again before noon, I’ll ventilate both your knees personally.”

Outside, they have to detour around the two muttering triggermen and Hancock’s bodyguard Fahrenheit, who intones, “You ever try chess? Sometimes you need to sacrifice a piece to keep the game going. Keep that in mind.”

“I’m a Red Menace girl myself. It’s the sky barrels you’ve got to watch out for,” the boss responds with a serious nod.

“Haven’t we dodged certain death often enough today?” MacCready asks her, steering them quickly around the corner.

Nora just slides her arm around his waist, through the strap of his rifle. He reaches carefully over her head, trying not to tangle any of their hooks and straps and grenade pins together, and strolls past the Rail with his girl under his arm.

“She always says that to me,” Nora shrugs. “And usually, I just nod as if it’s profound, but sometimes my mouth runs away with me.”

“The evildoers were in my pants?” he quotes, and she ducks her head, probably hiding a smile. “I didn’t know you were friends with Hancock.”

“You didn’t mention it either,” she points out, and asks, “What was he on about, you coming up in the world compared to the last one?”

He sets his lips in a thin line. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She snorts instead of pressing him, but when he turns his head, it’s her patented rueful half-smile. “You don’t have to. Anyway, I understand…you should have seen the boy I went out with in high school. He’d have fit in pretty well with the Med-Tek lobby crew. All I can say in my own defence? He was in a band.”

“No,” he replies quickly, “Nothing like that. It was, uh…” He tilts his head back and forth a few times. “Some on-my-own time. He walked in on me.”

“Aw, Mac…” She laughs and tugs him closer with the arm around his waist. “That sounds mortifying.”

“You have no idea,” he says, and continues, hoping to make her laugh again. “He was blasted on I don’t know what. Practically kicked the door down, insisting it was his office. And anyone else, they’d, I don’t know, laugh, or leave at least, but him? He starts in with advice.”

She does laugh again, leaning her head on his shoulder.

“He’s all, ‘hold it that way’ and ‘do this with your thumb’ and making these gestures while I’m telling him to get out, but trying to be quiet about it so Fahrenheit doesn’t crash in with her minigun waving. And he’s all, ‘don’t put it away, brother, look,’ and next thing he’s got his fly down and he’s demonstrating, and I can’t get out because he’s leaning on the door, and then he passes out and I’ve got to get him decent before I can drag him up to the flophouse to sleep it off…”

He gives up and laughs with her, the two of them staggering together into the wall across from the hotel. “And I really don’t want to talk about it, ok?”

“Fair enough,” she hiccups, and rubs tears from her eyes. “It’s too long since we slept. I’m getting punchy.”

“There hasn’t been anyone else since Lucy,” he says in a low voice, surprising himself. It’s not a thought he wants in his own head, let alone telling Nora, with the feel of her so fresh on his skin, the sight of them joined together flashing in his eyes every time he blinks, but that’s what’s nagging at him now that there’s no gun to his head. The mirth falls off her face and she just blinks at him, but he plows on blindly. “Yeah, that’s…a while. And that’s not an excuse, being out of practice, and anyway back then we were trying to get pregnant, and then she was and it didn’t matter, and…”

Nora just keeps blinking, but there’s something like comprehension dawning.

“Look, I know you said not to apologise,” and he’s babbling now, but there doesn’t seem to be a bottom to the kettle of boiling words that want to steam out. “But I’m just saying, I won’t let it happen again, and hopefully we’ll be lucky this time and…”

She has to put her finger on his mouth to stop him, and he’d thank her for it if he was able.

“Y’know, you’ve just cleared up something I should have figured out myself…which is not a topic I’m going to bring up right now,” she winces a little and sighs, “or ever, actually, but it’s just occurred to me that ‘contraception’ is probably one of those words that’s fallen out of the common dictionary since – since I was in the vault.”

He pulls his head back from her restraining hand, wondering what it is she’s dodging _this_ time, and confirms: “It was new to me.”

“The contraceptive shot, it suppressed the whole cycle while it lasted, ovulation, period, everything.” She smiles a little at the irritated look he’s probably nailing her with and clarifies: “So no risk of pregnancy. At least not for another couple of months.”

“Oh,” he says, and he looks over the road at the hotel for a minute or two, absently kissing her fingers when she presses them to his mouth again. “So, two months?”

She takes his hand and pulls him across the street. “Maybe we should hurry up and get that room.”


	14. Chapter 14

MacCready manages to talk the woman at the Rexford’s front desk into two nights in exchange for Hancock’s drugs, saving the caps for a bowl of noodles they can split later. Nora bumps his shoulder as they walk up the stairs, twirling the key on her finger, and tells him he can take over the trading from now on.

“Too much talking,” he defers, watching her rattle the old key in the lock and half-wishing they were breaking in instead. “That’s your area. I’ll stick to shooting any idiot who tries to rip you off.”

The room’s a dump, but it’s got a bed and four walls and – he’s surprised to see – their own bathroom. Although he probably shouldn’t be surprised, given their reputations as friends of the mayor just kept their heads attached, that they’ve been stashed in one of the nicer hovels.

“Thank god,” Nora mutters, and immediately drops her pack to run the tap over her pip-boy, happily announcing: “It’s hardly irradiated…and only a little gritty. And there’s even half a bar of soap in the tub! Such luxury.”

MacCready leaves his pack next to hers, has another look around the room and peeks out the cracks in the boarded-up window, not entirely sure what to do with his hands except shift his rifle from one shoulder to the other. Nora seems to suffer from no such awkwardness, fishing the blood-stained blankets out of their bags to cover up the even filthier mattress and setting two jars of purified on the rickety nightstand. “I’m going to freshen up.”

He nods and listens to her splash in the sink, kicking off his boots and laying back on the bed. It’s not the worst mattress he’s ever flopped on, and that’s close enough to comfortable that he’s half-dozing a few minutes later when she returns, the top of her vault suit loosely tied around her waist.

“You want to get some shut-eye?” she asks softly, smiling like she wouldn’t mind too much, and sits on the side of the bed to take off her boots.

“Not on your life,” he mumbles, shaking the sleep from his head and dropping his hat on the other bedside table.

“Good,” she smiles, kicking her boots next to the wall and peeling off her socks, standing to untie the arms of her jumpsuit and wiggle it down over her hips and off. She unties the leather necklace, dropping it next to their water with a solid thunk. 

She raises an eyebrow when he just watches her strip down to her underwear, remembering how she looked dressing down her second-in-command like she wasn’t more naked than any woman he’d ever seen. He hadn’t gotten more than a blink of her then, and the warehouse had been dark, but the dawn light creeping through the boarded window picks out the strong line of her back, the softness padding her hipbones that months of hard travelling haven’t yet managed to pare away. When he makes no move to join her, she wrinkles her nose and sways extravagantly, turning on her toes to stretch and pose like the faded girls painted on old bomber wrecks, but when she looks over her shoulder at him, for just a heartbeat her face is more anxious than coy.

“Do that again,” he asks, leaning up on his elbows for a better look. “Maybe a little slower?”

Instead, she flops on the bed with deliberate gracelessness, tugging the band of her underwear a little higher.

“C’mon,” she says, pulling at his jacket. “Get out of all that. I haven’t even gotten a good look at you yet.”

He swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands up slowly, reluctantly taking off his jacket and unbuckling the armour pieces while she watches, leaning against the broken chest of drawers with her arms crossed, telling himself it’s only fair she’s giving him the same hairy eyeball. He hesitates at the top fastener of his Brotherhood suit.

“You sure about this, boss?” he says, wincing a little at both the slip back into her title and the whining note in his voice. “The doors here don’t lock in any serious way.”

She only smiles again at that and jams the room’s single chair under the doorknob. “I can probably rig up Sparky to blast any hordes that break in.”

He snorts at the teasing, lets her undo the suit and push it off his shoulders, dropping it on the floor. She makes a pained noise as she runs his fingers over his chest.

“I’d have gone easier on you if I’d known,” she says, and he looks down to confirm, yeah, everywhere that hurts has bloomed into nasty bruises, most of them clearly in the shape of human-ish teeth or fists.

“I’ve had worse,” he shrugs.

“I really should’ve gotten a power suit for you, too,” and he doesn’t bother to tell her he’d have no idea how to use one anyway, would have been left behind the first time he tripped and got stuck on his back like a drunk mirelurk, because whatever regret she’s feeling sure doesn’t slow down her hands. 

She pushes him back down on the bed and it’s easier to get the bottom half undone and off with her kissing instead of staring at him, kicking them inside-out to the floor. She reaches back blindly and finds one of their blankets, flipping it over them to keep off the chill of the room and settles between his legs and it’s easier then he’d believe to forget they’re lying unarmoured and unprotected right after pissing off the second-heaviest armed gang of jagoffs in the Commonwealth. There’s just the feel of her skin against his, the taste of her, the faint smell of pre-war soap in the cocoon of warmth that quickly builds around them between the blankets.

And she just keeps kissing him, slowly, running her fingers along every inch of his skin she can reach, like they’ve got forever to get off instead of whatever little window of not being shot at their luck will allow.

She pulls away, just far enough to resettle on her side against him, resting her head on his shoulder. He reaches down and hooks his thumb in her underwear, and she obligingly shifts to let him pull them down, to kick them off under the blanket, but only lies back against him, one leg shifting over his, the rougher texture of her hair pressing into his hip. She lays her hand flat on his stomach, moving her wrist so her arm teasingly brushes the head of his straining cock.

“What do you like?” she asks, kissing his neck, and when he doesn’t answer, clarifies, “What feels good?”

_Sex_ , is all he can think to say, _sex feels good, would feel very good right now_ , so instead he points the question back to her. “What do you like?”

He feels her smile against his neck and she moves her leg higher on his when she answers slowly, “I like…a variety of things. As often as humanly possible.”

“You’ll get no argument there,” he tells her, and she laughs a little.

Her cheeks are redder than usual when she rests her head up on one hand to look at him. “I require a bit more effort than the nice ladies in all those saucy romance novels…as I’m sure you noticed.”

“I don’t think I quite got it down,” he teases, slipping a couple of fingers underneath the band of her bra. “You should show me again.”

“Later,” she catches his hand. “You never answered me – what do you like?”

“Same as you,” he shrugs. “Especially the ‘often as humanly possible’ part.”

She pushes the blanket down and moves his hand to cover himself. “Show me.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, but despite her little smile, she doesn’t tell him it’s a joke. He shrugs again and gives it a try, half-heartedly pulling on his desperately hard dick a few times before stilling. It’s embarrassing as any stupid thing he’s ever done, but there’s an avid interest in her gaze he doesn’t want to lose. 

“Nor, I don’t see why I’m doing this when I got you here.”

She kisses him on the neck again and puts her hand over his. “So I know what to do with you.”

He snorts at that. “You know what to do just fine.”

She shifts lower, resting her head on his chest, and moves her hand higher to touch his foreskin. “Not so much with this. Looks like I could hurt you without meaning to.”

He laughs a little at the thought. “What, vault guys are born without?”

“No, actually,” she replies. “It’s surgically removed.”

“What,” he yelps, shifting to sit up, but she leans on his chest until he settles. “I thought you vaulties didn’t go in for any of that tribal stuff?”

“Sorry,” she tries to sooth. “Shouldn’t have brought it up. Look, just don’t think about it. Show me what you do, so I’ll know.”

“I don’t see you giving me any demonstrations,” he grumbles, still trying to delay the inevitable. Of course he’s going to do whatever she wants.

“You just have to ask,” she replies.

“I’m asking,” he says quickly, but she shakes her head and tightens her hand.

“I asked first,” she says. “I’ve got dibs.”

“Dibs?” he huffs, but it’s more laughter than anger, and he knows she knows it. “Yeah, fine. Sure. Just, let’s switch hands.”

It’s a hell of a lot easier, guiding her hand as she works him, especially when she shifts to prop herself up, leaning down to kiss her way across his stomach, until it’s suddenly far too easy and he has to pull her hand away for the space of a few deep breaths.

“You ok?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just give me a minute.”

She runs her hand along his thigh for a few heartbeats before reaching for him again. “That minute up yet?”

“No,” he says, taking her hand. “Give it a real minute, if you want me to be good for anything else. This…the point of this is usually to get it over with fast, and that’s not the kind of impression I’m trying to make, here.”

The grin the spreads across her face is a wicked one. “So don’t.”

She crawls closer and kisses him, hard, pressing the soft stretch of her stomach down on his erection until he groans into her mouth. “Nora…”

She gently nips his bottom lip. “Not yet.”

She works her hand between them and takes hold of him again, but lightly, tormentingly, twisting her grip in a way he definitely didn’t show her. He breaks off the kiss to pant, desperate for air, and wheezes, “Not yet?”

“I’ll tell you when,” she laughs, and only laughs harder when he calls her an evil woman, dipping her head to kiss his neck, run her tongue along the line of his collarbone, and even though it makes no damn sense at all, he somehow holds out while she teases him, working her mouth down his body.

“This is killing my wrist,” she finally complains, after hours must have passed without the slivers of light through the boards moving even an inch along the wall. And it’s over, then, whether she still means her order or not, when she licks him instead and tries to swallow him whole, her tongue moving along the head like her thumb had. She doesn’t pull away when he pushes farther into her mouth and chokes out a warning, only shifts to take him in deeper, her eyes flicking up to meet his.

And there it is again, that flicker of worry, quickly stifled. He’d throw the brakes on, pull her up into his arms, if she didn’t dig her rough nails into his ass and tighten her lips on him.

He’s pissed that some jagoff chooses exactly that moment to set off a car explosion outside the hotel, but it’s a few seconds before he can find his legs again to think about rolling out of bed and putting his rifle to the window. Long enough to remember Hancock had all the derelict cars dragged out of Goodneighbor for exactly that reason, catch Nora’s complacent expression, and realise purely internal nuclear blasts are apparently something his body is capable of.

As soon as she pulls away, reaching over him toward the bedside table, he shifts down to catch her arm, drag her into his lap and kiss her. There’s a little thrill from the taste of them together, mostly undercut by the actual harshness of it, as he tries to chase away whatever worry’s in her head that keeps peeking out. But she’s only laughing, pulling away to demand her water, giggling harder when he stammers for one more minute and wrestles her back for another deep kiss.

He could think he imagined it, when she finally escapes and drinks half the jar before offering it to him, still chuckling as she settles in his arms murmuring, “You just keep surprising me, Mac.”

“Surprisingly good,” he slurs, intending to rile her up with her own words, but he’s too tired for anything more complicated than sincerity. “M’falling asleep, boss. C’you take first watch this time?”

“Got it covered,” she yawns into his chest.


	15. Chapter 15

When he wakes, Nora’s rolled up in her own blanket next to him, and their clothes are hanging, half-dry, in the cracks of the boarded-up window.

_So much for going out for noodles_ , he thinks, but the familiarity of the scene makes him smile as he wraps up in the other blanket and finds the sliver of soap she’s left him. He uses it to wash up and shave, remembering all those boxes of Abraxo Lucy would insist he drag along, the wire rack she made for their fires with space both for cooking and hanging whatever laundry she’d declared a biohazard before they made camp.

Afterward, he lays out their guns on the mattress and uses her maintenance kit to clean and oil his rifle and the two of her favourites that aren’t likely to blow up in his hands, before deciding to give Sparky a try. Nora’s a snoring pile of blankets and wild hair next to him through most of it, waking with a start and grabbing his arm before he can crack the laser rifle’s casing open.

“How’d you even know what I was doing?” he asks, spooked by her sightless eyes.

“I dreamed the old neighbourhood exploded,” she mumbles, shaking her head and yawning before releasing his hand and checking her pip-boy. “After sundown. Can’t think of when I last slept so long.”

MacCready’s pretty sure the med-x kept her out at least that long after the Gunner hit, but decides not to take that stroll down memory lane, handing her Sparky instead.

“Here,” she says, unlatching her pip-boy before taking the laser rifle. “We should check how much radiation you took in Med-Tek.”

“I feel fine.” He lets her slide it over his hand anyway, wincing as the sensor needle sets in his wrist. He flicks through the status screens, rolling his eyes to see his bruised torso classified as “crippled,” and shows her the radiation reading. “See, not even 200 rads.”

She hooks a bag from her diminishing supply of Rad-Away to the pip-boy anyway, silencing his protest with a tart, “It’s not zero.”

“C'mere,” he says before she can start breaking down Sparky, untangling his blanket so she can settle against him, propping his rigged-up arm around her waist. She turns his hand upward so he can hold the smaller components as she flicks off circuits in series and strips them from the rifle, and for a while there's just the good smell of soap and gun oil and ozone, the humid warmth building inside their two blankets. He unties the leather strip around her drooping bun with his free hand and tries to run his fingers through her hair, immediately catching in tangles.

“Careful,” she says. “That's a good way to lose a hand.”

“I think it's pretty.” He gently stretches out a knot between his thumb and forefinger.

“My mother had pretty hair,” she corrects him. “It would grow out in this perfect halo, even if she did usually have it braided down to fit under her helmet. Dad, on the other hand, was always bald as a cueball, but rumor was he had golden curls when he was a kid, made all the mothers of little girls sick with jealousy. Somehow between them, I ended up with this briar patch.”

Once freed, the curl whips around his thumb like a particularly aggressive centaur's tongue. He starts on another.

“I swear, most of my allowance used to go on conditioners and straightening cream before I had to shave it for basic training.” She turns her head enough to show him half her smile. “And I'd do it again now, if this nose and bumpy skull didn't make me look like a plucked chicken.”

He works a snarled bobby pin out of a lock tucked behind her ear and drops it on the table next to her necklace. “So assign one of the more useless settlers to be your full-time hair wrangler. There's probably an old world military rank for that.”

She chuckles and thinks for a moment. “General's valet, maybe. Although I doubt Preston would go for it.”

“Put a shine on the uniforms, maybe a parade?” he snorts. “Preston's exactly the kind of assh – guy who'd love that.”

She laughs a little and doesn't disagree, returning the small components from his hand to Sparky one by one and flicking their circuits back on. “You know, I should have guessed you're a dad.”

“Really?”

“I'd wondered why you kept biting back your curses, even when it was clear I didn't give a damn.”

“Yeah, well, when you've got a little guy imitating everything you do, you clean it up pretty fast.” The usual stab of pain, when it comes, isn't quite as sharp as he expects. “Back when it was just Duncan and me...a lot of the things I did, I'd feel Lucy's eyes on me. Like, 'you raising our kid to be some kinda raider?'”

_He’s gonna be ok_ , he thinks again. _Cure’s on the road to him right now._

“Hey,” she says, putting her rifle to the side and reaching for his bag. “I found this when I was scraping the bottom for things to trade with Daisy. Is it Duncan’s?”

She hands him the cloth-wrapped bundle that’s usually tucked in the inside half-pocket next to his back, letting him unwrap the little wooden soldier inside.

“It is now.” He touches the clumsily carved arms, the faded paint of the face, before handing it back to her. “Used to be mine. Lucy made it for me when we were kids, after I told her I was going to be a soldier. I tried to carve her one that looked like a doctor, but just managed to slice halfway through a tendon under my thumb, and she told me to stop making work for her.”

“The mayor and the doctor…you two were quite the Little Lamplight power couple.”

Despite the flip tone, her fingers are tenderly tracing the lines of the little toy and when she turns her head, there’s no mockery, only a sad smile.

So he rests his chin on her shoulder and replies, “Nah, we were kids. Best friends, probably, ever since I got squished in a bad cave-in and she managed to stim my arms and legs back on the right way, but just kids. We’d’ve had to come up in the world to be called losers by the time we were together, running the trader circuit outside Steel territory, her patching folk up and me mostly guarding her, picking up Regulator bounties when I could.”

She’s quiet for a long time after he runs out of words, slowly turning the toy in her hands. He’s not entirely sure what you’re supposed to talk about with a new lover, especially one who’s both naked and handling heavy weaponry, but it’s probably not your last one. It’s just been too long since he could remember anything about Lucy without her death getting in the way of it, and he can’t quite let that moment pass without lingering on it a little.

“That was one of the first things Nate told me, too, that he was going to be a soldier,” she surprises him, finally. “Family tradition – his grandfather was one of the heroes of…well, it doesn’t matter now. But it’d blow all the braid off his stupid hat if that old coot knew the egghead daughter-in-law was now the ‘General Freis’ in the family.”

She snorts and rubs her nose, leaving a streak of gun oil on her cheek. “We broke up a couple of times because I didn’t want to be a military wife, dragged from pillar to post and struggling to even have a career, let alone excel. But it never stuck. In the end, I enlisted too, the day before we got married. At least it paid for grad school, even if I barely used the damned degree, after all of it.”

She’s breathing carefully, too deep and too slow, when she puts the toy in his hand and checks the pip-boy’s monitor.

“Zero,” she reports with faint satisfaction, unhooking the pip-boy and empty rad-away bag. He licks his thumb and wipes the smear of grease off her face, but the little smile he gets in return is perfunctory and doesn’t reach her eyes. She sets the pip-boy on the dresser next to her necklace and crawls away from him, opening both their packs to rearrange their supplies.

“I can do mine,” he tells her, wanting to be sure the little toy goes back in its right place, and hears the jingle of caps when she tosses it on the bed next to him. Curious, he tucks the wrapped soldier away and finds his bag of caps in the front pocket. He pulls it out, estimating by its weight that there’s at least the 70 caps she’d paid him the week before, probably closer to the 120 caps he’ll be owed next payday. Minus the usual bonus, of course, but he isn’t about to complain.

“What’s this?” When she ignores him, seemingly absorbed in the exact best placement of her spare clips, he holds up the bag.

“Hmm? Oh…your money? It’s all there.”

_And then some_ , he thinks. “But I saw you buy a fusion core. I figured we were running on empty, after that.”

She frowns and pulls her blanket tighter around her shoulders. “So you’re calling me a thief? Well, ok, that’s fair, but I wouldn’t steal from you, at least. I made a nice little pile of caps from Quinlan and Neriah’s projects back on the Prydwen…and I sold all the 10mm ammo. I can resupply on the road easily enough.”

“Nora…only an idiot trades away their ammo when they’ve still got caps.” He double-checks his bag, relieved to find all his .308 clips still in their outside pockets, and gives her an exasperated look. “And we could’ve come straight here.”

“ _I_ am out of caps,” she replies stiffly, shaking her pack and looking in to see what shifted.

He pushes the bag to the mattress between them. “So keep half of these on you, then.”

“So you’re proposing we merge our finances?” She raises a sharp eyebrow. “That’s quite a big step, especially with the person who’s signing your checks.”

“Signing my…?”

“Paying you.”

“Right,” he replies, “and none of _those_ caps have ended up back in your pocket.”

Her eyes flash at that. “I’ve never shorted you. And I would’ve paid you back for that fusion core, if you hadn’t – ”

“That’s what I’m saying. My caps go on your fuel, your ammo and stims got me where I needed to be. I don’t work for you, I work with you.”

“It’s good you’ve finally informed me of your promotion, then,” she says harshly, reaching past him for the leather tie, accidentally picking up the necklace first and dropping it to the mattress like it’s burned her.

“This isn’t news to you,” he frowns, rolling the heavy necklace into a ball and returning it to the little table, where it uncoils like a radscorpion’s tail. “You said it – what you drop, I pick up. And when I asked for help, you couldn’t shove over your own mission fast enough.”

“You asked me to commit mass murder, and I did,” she glares back. “I do that for every asshole I meet out here…aside from the people and former people I kill without so much as a ‘hello’.”

“Yeah, well, my favors were the only ones you didn’t benefit from.” She’s getting louder, so he tries getting softer. “We got me out of that jam with the Gunners, and we got to Duncan’s cure. Now we don’t do anything but get you closer to bringing Shaun home.”

“That’s not your responsibility.” She shrugs the blanket higher on her shoulders. “I haven’t asked you to join any crusade.”

“You should’ve,” he growls, losing the struggle to keep his voice down. That tight jaw, the ten-cap words, it reminds him of their fight out past the Red Rocket. The one, he can’t help but remember, when she said she’d only taken up with a guy before to forget about everything she’d lost for a little while. “This…you…your friendship means the world to me. And I owe you too much to do anything else.”

“So am I a friend or an obligation?” she snaps, viciously tying the top of her pack closed. “I just can’t imagine which would make me happier.”

“D’you even need me in this conversation? How about I just move my mouth and you fill in whatever will piss you off most?”

It shouldn’t feel as good as it does to watch her droop like he’s kicked the wind out of her.

“Okay,” she says, squeezing the bridge of her nose, and sits on the side of the bed. “Truce?”

He chews the inside of his mouth for a moment. It’s almost satisfying to have her on the ropes for a change, and it feels like a loss not to press the advantage. “Yeah.”

She rubs her face, fingertips lingering on the scar across her cheeks. Her lips twitch into the beginnings of her old rueful smile before she gives it up with a sigh. “As Dr Matulewicz never got tired of saying, vulnerability is not my strength. I’d rather fight and feel like I won something.”

He shifts uncomfortably under his blanket, rejecting the responses that come immediately to mind before he grudgingly admits, “I might know something about that.”

She doesn’t apologise, and neither does he. After a quiet minute or two, he asks, “Will you get back under the blanket? It’s chilly in here on my own.”

She’s colder than she should be and shivering when she settles in next to him, shifting her blanket to cover their legs. He puts his arm around her and rubs her shoulder, letting the silence stretch until she’s warmer, until she finds his free hand and takes it in both of hers. 

“I trust you,” she tells him, or more specifically his neck, leaning her head on his shoulder.

“About time,” he responds, tightening his arm around her.

She snorts at that. “There hasn’t been anyone else out here that…you’re the only one who doesn’t hold it against me, that I’ve got my own agenda.”

“It’s my agenda, too,” he insists.

“Shut up,” she says, but softly, tracing his fingers with hers. “You don’t know what you’re agreeing to. And, hell, that caravan just left today. You can still catch up to it. Get back to your life.”

Her hands tighten on his.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he sighs, “I told you. She won’t take the risk that I could’ve been compromised, and this is before she knows I’ve been working with a Brotherhood Initiate up here, heck, even sat in on a briefing with Maxson himself. Best thing I can do for Duncan is get a life ready for him up here.”

“And you really think someone like me has any place in that?”

“Yeah, you’re right, boss – with you, I’ve only got, what, seven or eight settlements to choose between? Couldn’t you have made it an even dozen, at least?”

She pokes him in the side and only repeats herself, “You don’t know what you’re agreeing to. Or who you’re gambling on. I haven’t been honest with you.”

“You think I don’t know that?” She jerks her head back to give him a sharp look, but he only shrugs. “You only pull that Super Duper Mart housewife act you use on everyone else with me when you’re covering something up.”

“Super Duper Mart housewife…?”

The look she gives him is so appalled he has to laugh.

“Yeah, like if those old posters could talk.” He clears his throat and tries to imitate her, sounding half strangled. “Oh, will we have the Mr Handy whip us up a salisbury steak to go with our instamash, or shall we all skip straight to getting smashed on the veranda and watch the bombs fall?”

She doesn’t laugh at that, just leans her head on his shoulder again. “Whatever it is, well, you don’t know the worst things I’ve ever done either,” he tells her.

“I don’t want to talk about this right now, Mac.”

“I know what I want,” he insists stubbornly. “I can wait as long as you’d like to say it, but it’s not going to change.”

“Mac…” she groans. “This is an important conversation, and we’re going to have it. Just, after you know more about me, and when we’re both wearing pants, and I’m not ready for either of those things to happen right this second.”

She shifts to straddle him, slowly enough that he could stop her. He doesn’t, but tilts his head back so she can’t avoid looking at him. Her eyes are bloodshot, like she’s been rubbing them again under the blanket, but hopeful. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees reluctantly. She’s warmer now, but still shaking, still breathing too slowly.

“We’ve still got tonight before they kick us out…” She runs her hands down his arms, hesitating when her thumbs reach his elbows.

“I don’t know what you’re expecting, but I’m at the bottom of my bag of tricks.” It’s not entirely true, but he still feels like fighting about _something_. “We couldn’t all grow up in a vault full of dirty books.”

She glares at him for a long moment, her chin jutting forward, before breaking into a dazzling, vapid grin and declaring, “The romance novels were pretty tame, actually. Girl meets unsuitable boy, is terrifically satisfied via the missionary position with the lights out, and marries him when he turns out to be secretly rich. Ladies’ magazines, on the other hand….especially the good old _Housewife’s Choice_ …now, that had recipes for killer brownies, diets that certainly didn’t include the aforementioned brownies, fashion spreads just like the clothes you already owned, and then the last few pages would have some harmless little article on strengthening your marriage that offered helpful tips on blowjobs or bondage knots or which chapters of the kama sutra are actually worth the effort. I was particularly fond of the cheerful diagrams mapping out the trickier positions.”

He swallows hard and tries to relocate his eyebrows somewhere south of his hairline. It’s easily the best _fuck you_ he’s ever received and by all rights should end with a slam of the bathroom door instead of the level stare she usually puts on right before they start shooting. She lowers her voice but none of the challenge in it when she concludes, “A lonely military wife would never get the chance to try out even half of them.”

Kissing her is the wrong thing to do, he’s sure, when she’s so obviously, insultingly, playing him, but for all her insistence that this could mean nothing, she’s the one holding on tight enough to leave a new set of bruises on his back. And, heck, it’s not like he can exactly play hard to get while they’re plastered together, his reaction to the images she’s painted digging into her thigh.

Kissing quickly devolves into wrestling, Nora digging her toes into the mattress when he tries to roll them over. “It is absolutely my turn to be on top.”

“Yeah, well,” he whispers back, feeling his face heat up, “I want to go down on you first.”

“Oh, by all means,” she says like it’s some kind of surprise, then, “wait,” when he pins her hips flat to the mattress and shifts to her side instead, spreading her legs so he can rest his head on her thigh. He runs his hand against the grain of the soft hair on her calf as she leans her other leg on his side, tracing a deep nailboard scar he stimmed up for her weeks ago, and wishes she made everything so easy for him.

She groans his name when he’s barely tasted her, sighing like she’s his when he slides his tongue inside her, working his lips along her folds. She buries her fingers in his hair, gently scratching his scalp with her rough nails, and he falls into the rhythm of her movements, growling wordlessly when she suddenly pulls hard enough to hurt.

“Sorry,” she breathes, “just, do that again.”

He shakes his head enough to dislodge her hand before complying, gently running his tongue around her clitoris, then sucking it hard between his lips. She moans and pushes harder against him, then flinches when he drags his nails across her ribs trying to get a steadying grip on her. Curious, he repeats the motion, grinning to himself when she huffs, “Knock it off, that tickles.”

And because he’s feeling a little cruel, he shifts so he’s pinning her leg under his shoulder before returning his mouth to her, and just as she moans again he pounces, attacking that sensitive stretch of her side. She yelps and tries to wriggle away but he holds her down, mercilessly working her with lips and hands as she giggles and pants. He catches her foot when she kicks him, lightly, in the chest, and discovers that she’s ticklish on her soles, as well.

She writhes underneath him, moaning that he’s a sadist, a complete bastard, but she’s laughing too, hard enough that whoever’s in the next room bangs on the wall for the _fuckin’ jetheads_ to _shaht ahp_ , and too quickly her gasped, “I can’t breathe,” ends in a long, low groan. He releases her then, pressing his lips against her while she shudders.

“So that’s an empty bag of tricks, hmm?” she asks, and hiccups.

He puts on an innocent face and tells her, “A man’s got to have some mystery, boss.”

He closes his eyes and taps his forehead on her thigh, for lack of anything harder nearby. “Sorry, Nor. Force of habit.”

“It’s okay,” she smiles as he settles up on his elbows over her. “Although it’s nice to hear one damn person out here use my name. Funny thing is, I could never imagine you calling me anything but ‘boss’.”

“Nora,” he says again, arching against her, then, “Wait, you imagined this? Us? When?”

“Christ, you’re hard,” she says, wrapping her legs around his hips and wriggling against him. It’s too easy to shift, line up and sink slowly into her tightness, watch her face go soft with renewed pleasure. She tries to force it into stern lines when she answers him. “I plead the fifth regarding any quiet stretches on the road with nothing to hold my attention but that goddamned perfect ass in front of me.”

He drops his gaze to her stomach, feeling his already overheated skin flush even further. She keeps saying things like that, too personal, too impersonal, and he has no idea how he’s supposed to respond. 

“The fifth what?” he asks instead.

“Never mind that,” she says and pulls him close, stretching to press her lips to his forehead and, sighing, rests her cheek against his. “If we leave tomorrow, don’t take on any unnecessary hits, how quickly can we get to Sanctuary?”

He shifts uncomfortably, hoping this isn’t a conversation that’ll go on too long, and thinks. “If we make for the Slog, first, then it should be an easy run through the northern settlements, since we cleared out the worst threats there a few weeks ago. So…couple of days?”

“All right,” she nods, her skin sweat-slippery against his. “Two days, then, and we’ll have that talk. And I’ll try not to mix up my messages so much before then.”

“Nora,” he starts, but she kisses him and moves her hips to take the rest of him in, then pulls back. Groaning, he pushes forward again, pressing her into the mattress.

“Let’s just make each other feel good for right now,” she whispers, and shivers. “And you do feel very good.”

He decides to take her advice, and his time, the way he’d intended to before. She calls him a sadist again as he sets a slow pace but sighs happily when he licks his thumb and gently strokes that tender bundle of nerves. She rolls her hips to meet his, locking her arms around his neck, and whimpers again that he feels so damn good. 

She kisses his neck and asks, “Can you hold out? I think I could go again.”

“Long as you need,” he says, hoping that’s true, getting a bubble in his chest at the way she smiles.

“Try something new,” he impulsively orders her. 

“New?” she laughs a little, and he shrugs.

“One of your housewife’s choices.”

She bites her lip thoughtfully and after a moment murmurs, “You’re probably just about the right height,” before bending almost in half and swinging one of her legs over his shoulder, then the other, casually crossing her ankles behind his neck. He moves his arms out of the way as she shifts, wrapping them around her legs as she tells him to lean over, that it’s ok. Those strong muscles flex under his fingers, taking his weight easily, even if it looks like he’s got to be breaking her spine. It doesn’t feel much different to him, a little tighter, maybe, but from the way she closes her eyes and grinds against him, it’s making more of a difference to her.

“Harder,” she tells him, an order he’s happy to take, watching as she works a hand between her clenched thighs, bracing the other against the rickety old headboard as it slams into the wall. He barely even hears their neighbour banging and yelling again, enthralled by the tight concentration on her face, and when she goes off again, clenching hard around him with a whimper, it hits him like that too-close blast from the mini-nuke. He falls still, forgetting what he’s supposed to be doing, resting his temple on her knee and wondering how he’s gone so long without feeling that again.

A few heartbeats later, she murmurs happily that she can’t move and, awash with altruism, he asks, “You want to try for another?”

She only laughs and clumsily unhooks her legs, stretching until her toes curl, telling him, “For the love of god, Mac, don’t be a hero.”

He lets her push him over, sink down onto him again with a slight wince, and she rides him with a slow, undulating motion that barely taps the headboard into the wall, and nah, there was no way he could have held out for another go. She feels too good, breasts brushing his chest as she rocks, kissing him like she’s got no need to breathe, and when he does come it’s almost more of a relief than pleasure. 

She doesn’t let him go, afterward, still kissing him until his lips feel bruised, even as he slips out and the blankets are a mess and he’s sure neither of them cares. She’s wrapped tight around him and it’s warm and it’s good and he’s definitely going to murder whoever’s been hammering on their door.

He reluctantly pulls away and moves to get up, but she tells him she’ll handle it, draping one of the blankets around her middle, leaving him to scramble under the other one just before she whips open the door as casually as if she’s in her pink Sanctuary dress.

“Yes, Clair?” she says to the gargoyle from the front desk.

“We’ve been getting complaints about the noise,” Clair growls at her, craning her head to glare around the rest of the room. MacCready shifts a little lower under the blanket. “You think I’m not broke enough, you’ve got to drive away the little business I’ve got?”

She just pushes sweat-soaked hair away from her face with one hand and smiles. “Oh, I am terribly sorry to hear that. I do promise we’ll be quiet as kittens until morning. Cross my heart!”

And Clair actually smiles back at her, abusing facial muscles clearly designed to do nothing of the type. It shouldn’t surprise him anymore, how people roll over for her, the woman the entire Commonwealth calls ma’am even in a filthy Grognak the Barbarian costume. When she shamelessly digs into his bag for caps and convinces the cranky old woman to be just the dearest darling and run out to pick them up a couple bowls of noodles, there’s no doubt in his mind he’s going to love her the rest of his life, whether she wants it or not.


	16. Chapter 16

He wakes up early, ready to take the pre-dawn watch before he registers the warm body in his arms, the relatively soft mattress underneath them. He’s still full from midnight noodles in bed, his bruised muscles are healing fast, and he’s more than half convinced that leaving this hotel room will be the worst mistake of his life, so he stays quiet and listens to her breathe. She’s still out, her chest barely moving, like she’s missed months of sleep instead of a night or two before they checked in.

Carefully, he runs his fingertips along her lower belly, tracing the ridges of stretch marks and the softness underneath, and tries to picture two little boys tearing around Sanctuary instead of memorising the feel of her skin.

The light touch is enough to wake her, and even though she pushes his hand away with a grimace, she rolls over to plant her face on his and they pass a nice stretch of the pre-dawn gloom tangled up together.

“If we start this again,” she says, kissing him one last time before pulling away, “we’ll not leave this room until you’re completely broke and they force us out at gunpoint.”

“Fine with me, beautiful,” he says, but lets her escape into the bathroom, listens to her quiet grumbling at the lack of soap as the old plumbing groans. It’s probably seen more use in the last two days than the entire year before. 

He busies himself taking down their dry clothes, trying not to think of all the ways it’d be logical to just join her in the tub, then carries his own set in with him when she exits shivering in her blanket, wringing out wet hair and telling him the shower’s all his. He’s fairly sure that’s not a sideways order, but suffers through a cold wash anyway, dressing quickly afterward, since vaulties usually have stupidly sensitive noses. It’s not like he’s trying to wring the most he can out of the last moments of this audition, fix whatever ways he’s not measuring up before she can give him the brush-off…

Nah, it’s exactly like that, much as he wants to believe otherwise.

She’s tying her necklace when he comes out, and it could easily feel like the last few days never happened, except that she absently straightens the collar of his jacket and smiles when he takes her hand walking down the steps. She lets it go with a quick squeeze at Goodneighbor’s barricade, and asks him to lead the way as she shoulders open the splintery door.

It’s harder than he’d like, falling back into their usual patterns. She’s quiet, letting him scout out their route, and there’s a tightness in her stance when he looks back, but she smiles a little every time she catches him. His knee aches, and the lowering grey sky warns of a storm to come. They’ll be lucky if it’s just rain, he tells himself, not a radstorm out of the glowing sea, but at least in a radstorm, they’d be dry.

He remembers her joke from the night before about staring at his rear, tries to recall how long she’s been telling him to take point, and the thought of all that wasted time half kills him. He watches the horizon as diligently as before, but now his eyes can’t help but also pick out every wrecked structure, anything with walls and a roof no one else seems to have a claim on…

Which actually comes in handy when the sky opens up on them an hour away from the Slog.

“That way!” he calls, and runs to the wrecked cabin well off the road he’d spotted a quarter-mile back. They’re both half-soaked, and it’s a pathetic excuse for a lie in his own ears when he suggests they can wait out the storm under the overhang of the broken roof, but she agrees even though it’s a clearly a soaking early-winter rain that intends to hang around.

To his relief, she’s the one who swings Sparky back on her shoulder and yanks him close after the sketchiest of scouts around the immediate area for potential threats. They warm up their little dry corner and he’s just about ready to try convincing himself to protest that she shouldn’t be unzipping his suit, that whatever she’s got in mind is too dangerous for an exposed shelter like this, when she pauses to ask, “Did the world just go pink?”

He opens his eyes in time to catch the next flash of light and quickly fumbles his zip closed, grabbing his rifle and throwing himself with her against the half-intact wall. She catches it in her scope first, off to the east, and her body goes rigid.

“Assaultron.”

He swings his scope to look, and his heart sinks in his chest. “She’s with a Gunner squad.”

They’re tangling with super mutants, a big nest that will probably leave them with a few casualties, but he’d still not rather take the survivors on alone. Not with an Assaultron on their side, and the boss low on ammo.

“The Slog their likeliest target, you think?” she asks, her voice tight.

“Could be,” he agrees reluctantly. Even if there’s been no formal declaration of war between them and the Minutemen, any settlements are fair game for raids. “This rain will likely screw up her sensors, if we run for it now.”

They make it in record time, but he still suspects that, if the Gunners are coming at all, they’re not far behind. She must feel the same because she points him to the high watchtower behind the main building.

“Whistle if – when – you see them. Try to drive them onto the road.”

“Got it.”

He listens to her shout orders below him as he climbs into place and scans the road and woods to the east. There’s an explosion of activity below and a ghoul joins him in the bird’s nest with admirable speed, greeting him with a terse _hey there_ before setting up with her missile launcher in the opposite corner. He shifts his scope to watch Nora and Wiseman sprint down the wet pavement and quickly lay out mines, kicking dead grass and chunks of concrete in front of them as rough camouflage, but only for a few heartbeats. He’s not up here to keep an eye on her.

It’s a few more minutes, long enough for the noise below them to drop to little more than nervous shuffling, before he spots the first green helmet and whistles down. The multiple acknowledgements sound like a flock of particularly anxious birds spread across the compound, but at least everyone’s in place.

Too many of them are in the woods. He whispers across the bird’s nest, “Can you land one over there, push them toward the mines?”

She nods and lines up the shot, taking a quick drag on the cigarette dangling from her lip, and he shifts his scope back to the road so he won’t get blinded when it lands. As the missile explodes (the troops obediently swerving into the road away from it, straight toward the improvised minefield), the bright lines of Sparky’s lasers cut through the rain from the treeline across the road. And it makes sense, as she’s probably the second-best sharpshooter they’ve got, that she’s set up where they can catch the first wave in a crossfire, but she’s also the first enemy life sign the Assaultron will lock onto.

But he’s already moving away from her, as the ghoul sinks another missile into her launcher, and starts picking off the Gunners with the longest barrels already pointing toward their tower. He can try to protect Nora, or he can cover their heavy artillery and give them a chance to end this quick, before they lose too many people. He can’t do both.

The sky glows pink, and he instinctively swings his scope to find the Assaultron, as expected, honing right in on Nora. Forcing himself back on task, he takes out a sharpshooter he’s shocked to recognise, a guy he worked with on a particularly ugly settlement raid near Jamaica Plains, before the familiar face is gone in red mist. From the cacophony of bullets on metal, he knows the defence on the ground is concentrating fire on the Assaultron, hoping to take it out in time to explode while it’s still close to its own troops, and concentrates on his next target.

The mines slow them down a little, and a handful of haphazardly landed missiles hurt them more, but even after the Assaultron blows, too many of them break into the settlement. The ghoul sets aside her launcher and swings down into the melee with a .44, but MacCready stays high, aiming for skull insignias. The settlers’ armour is such a motley combination of leather and metal that he’s glad he’s not trying to tell them apart from raiders, at least, but several of them carry laser pistols or shotguns. He can’t make out through the distortion of the rain if any of the shots come from Sparky or Boomer, and too many of the Gunners are wearing leather dusters and helmets.

It’s ugly, but it’s quick; a few minutes later, the Gunners are all down. He’s impressed at the defence the settlers were able to muster, especially after such a pathetic massacre at Quincy, but supposes that pocketing all the best armour and weapons he and Nora dragged in must have made the difference. One of them casually checks the bodies, finishing off the wounded and taking their ammo. He still doesn’t see Nora, not until he ducks inside the building and finds her with Wiseman, giving orders and helping the settlement medic triage the wounded. She looks up and doesn’t smile, not over the struggling body under her hands, but nods. She’s bleeding badly from one ear and burned from some explosion or other but basically intact, so he satisfies himself with a tap on his hat in return and joins the ragged teams scavving the bodies before rolling them down to the river for the mirelurks to take care of.

At nightfall, he’s freezing in wet clothes but, as one of the only unwounded and little help with a medkit, takes the first watch shift around the perimeter, picking off a handful of ferals attracted by the noise. By then, the word in camp is that only two casualties on their side are still in danger, one of them a ghoul who’s been carried off to a nearby industrial dump, hoping the radiation can finish what the stims can’t. The rain’s let up, but his teeth are still chattering when he’s relieved at midnight, and he’d happily kill another squad of Gunners for a cigarette and shot of whiskey.

Nora’s wrapped up in their blankets by the stove inside when he finds her, the skin on her face and hands half-healed already, nodding at Wisemen’s suggestion to move the turrets higher, where they’ll be harder to disable.

“Our packs are in the back room,” she tells him, her mouth tight with worry as she looks him over.

“No injuries, boss,” he says, “I think I might be the only one who can say that.”

“Good,” she replies with a faint smile, and in the back room there’s not only their packs but a bottle of vodka, a set of ragged but blessedly dry clothes and a little privacy to change into them. She opens the blankets when he returns with the bottle and yipes when he reaches underneath the waistband of her borrowed pyjamas. Instead of pulling away, she snuggles close and wraps the blankets around them both, and it’s very very good to feel her heart beat when his hand settles high on her stomach.

“Gah, you’re a human icicle,” she complains. “Warm up, but go easy on the ribs. I’m almost as bruised as you now from tangling with that damn bot.”

“You and me both,” Wiseman grunts, rubbing his back. “Gimme a belt of that firewater.”

MacCready hands him the bottle and takes a closer look at Nora, tilting her head to check the ear that had been bleeding so badly.

“Concussion, busted eardrum, various burns, and generally tenderised,” she lists off for him. “All stimmed and healing.”

He grunts in approval and accepts the bottle back from Wiseman, taking a long swallow before passing it to Nora.

“You know, that actually lowers your core temperature,” she chides half-heartedly before taking a drink herself and putting the bottle firmly in his hand. “Don’t give that back to me. After today, I’m liable to neck the whole thing and start a vicious argument with the oil lamp.”

“I wouldn’t, boss,” he replies, “It’s got a mean look.”

“Boss,” Wiseman repeats sardonically and waggles his fingers for the bottle. “At least today wasn’t half the shitstorm it coulda been.”

“No,” Nora agrees, and he quickly kills the bottle with Wiseman, listening to them run a post-mortem on the fight, tinkering with future strategies. There’s none of the reproach he’d half-expected after leaving her exposed, because she’d kept Wiseman with her for back-up, letting him do his job.

He’s almost warm through when Wiseman dismisses them with the mocking _Goodnight, children_ only a pre-war ghoul can really pull off. It’s embarrassing to discover just how much of a lightweight he is after a few months away from the Third Rail, his snappy reply repository coming up empty, Nora’s steadying arm more of a help than he wants getting them to the borrowed mattress. 

He gently touches the red skin on her neck and she shivers, telling him, “Still healing.”

It’s not like they’ve even got the room to themselves, anyway, but it’s good enough to have her sleeping on his shoulder, good enough to know they can still fight together as well as before, rather than just with each other.

Back on the road the next morning, she takes point.

“It’s easier for me to keep my bearings out here,” she tells him. “In the city, I get turned around, expecting to cross town without any rubble or super mutants in my path.”

“Huh,” he replies, watching a young yaoguai through his scope, which fortunately doesn’t seem to have their scent. It turns away from them, plunging over the far ridge toward some closer prey. “I guess the vault maps would be a couple centuries out of date.”

She opens and closes her mouth, then says with a tight little _you got me_ smile, “Something like that.”

 _Keep your secrets, I don’t care_ , he wants to tell her, but only shrugs. “Sure, Nor.”

They make good progress, despite stopping at a couple of settlements to warn them of likely Gunner activity. She sends him in, waiting up the road herself, to avoid getting embroiled in any committee discussions, which just means he catches up to her with pocketfuls of notes scribbled on scorched paper. She tucks them into her kindling bundle without comment.

He watches her shoulders bunch up tighter the closer they get to Sanctuary, and her strained attempts at conversation trail off before the Red Rocket’s in sight. She goes off the road, then, passing close enough to Sanctuary’s walls to wave at the outside guard, and holsters Sparky.

“It’s safe enough along here,” she tells him, and takes his hand as they cross a rickety bridge and head up a narrow path through the woods.

At the top, there’s an old military installation, he assumes at first, given the remnants of security ringing it, but something about the platform, the rocky hill it crowns, stinks of Vault-Tek.

“Nora?” he asks nervously.

She shakes her head and doesn’t approach the platform, but goes instead into the guard post next to it, turning on the computer inside. He loses count after 26 keystrokes, and it’s a few minutes before she tells him to hit the elevator button.

“I haven’t been in one of these since…” he starts, but she’s not listening. She’s breathing too deeply, her fingers drumming against her thighs, as she stares fixedly at the platform. He thinks of Lucy as her labor dragged into the second day, that grim face when she told him to calm the fuck down because it was going to get a hell of a lot worse before it got better, and shivers.

He punches the button and is rewarded with a jolt that staggers him and the ear-piercing screech of old metal under pressure. Nora barely sways. The sky becomes a pitiful little disk overhead as the platform drops deep into the ground and a warped old recording tells them to wait until the elevator has come to a full stop before disembarking.

Nora doesn’t, pulling the doors open as soon as there’s enough space to duck and drop through, but he’s in no such rush. He can’t help but triage the place at first glance – find that leak, first of all, and lock it down before it can further rust solid metal – and categorise it as “very salvageable”. There’s air moving despite the chill, and that quiet background hum of generators, purifiers, computer banks, everything still working like it was installed yesterday. Even that ominous feeling, like there’s something in the shadows inches away from licking his ear, is a plus. They always said the evil vaults had the best scav, at least until the bad day they cracked 108.

He follows her down the gangway, their boots clanking on the old metal, passing a massive generator room on one side, until they reach a door that opens with the snap-hiss of good seals. Beyond it, there’s rows of strange pods, glowing from within, and all the hairs on the back of his neck are on end even before he makes out the bodies inside, twisted and frozen.

“It’s a lady’s prerogative to lie about her age,” she whispers harshly, “but two hundred and some years could be considered a bit of a whopper.”

“Two hundred years?” he echoes, looking from her to the pods, and like an idiot, says it again: “Two hundred years?”

Her eyes are too wide, fixed on the young woman in the nearest pod. “I was born in 2048. Came here in 2077. Walked out, I’m not sure, maybe six months ago? Time’s a bit funny, after you skim through it like a stone over a pond.”

“You’re pre-war?” he asks, wishing she would laugh and explain the joke. It’s not like he doesn’t know people that old, even calls some of them friends, but they show their age. Not like her.

“Saw the first bomb hit Boston from that platform up there,” she confirms quietly, and points at the frozen woman. “Vera and her husband owned the butcher’s on Main Street in Concord. Whenever business was bad, they’d throw a barbecue for the neighbourhood to get rid of the expired meat.”

She walks a few pods down, peeking through the glass lids, and points at a middle-aged man. “Haim. He was stationed in Anchorage when all that went to hell. Told me he took up knitting in the POW barracks there to keep the blood moving in his frostbitten fingers. He made these lumpy yellow booties for Shaun, and I never sent that thank-you card…”

She chokes and closes her eyes, breathing hard through her nose.

“I’m the only one left alive,” she whispers.

“Hey, Nor…” He shakes off the stunned paralysis and reaches for her, but she flinches away, bracing herself on Haim’s coffin-pod before pulling her hand back with a shudder. “We don’t…you don’t have to show me any of this. We don’t have to be here. I believe you, ok?”

She shakes her head and moves deeper into the pods. “I said we’d talk.”

He catches her hand. “Nora, yeah, it’s a surprise, but…I don’t know why it’s even a secret. Who’d care? You’re not even the only centuries-old person most folk know, just the best looking.”

His weak compliment doesn’t land.

“The first decent people I met out here, who didn’t try to kill me… Preston saw the suit, called me ‘Vaultie’, and there wasn’t any point in correcting him. Not when I didn’t know him from Adam, and with those raiders trying to murder us, and then having to kill the first deathclaw I’d ever seen, well, proper introductions rather slipped by the wayside.”

She pulls him deeper into the mausoleum.

“I learned early on that vault dwellers were a known quantity out here, naïve and crazy, maybe, but healthier and smarter than your average wastelander. People’d work with a vault dweller so long as she wasn’t drooling or barking at the moon, but those of us who were alive when the bombs fell?”

She shakes her head, her voice breaking. “You hate us. We’re the assholes who destroyed the world. You don’t even bury the dead, just leave our skeletons propped up like funny Halloween decorations. Even little kids, teddies still in their arms…”

He tugs on her hand, pulling them to a stop next to an old man with the frozen expression of someone who’s taken a bite of Vera’s bad sausages, and tries to explain. “Nora, it’s not that…there’s just so many of them.”

She barely glances at him, but it’s like she can see right into his memories, to back when it was still hilarious to jam a beer bottle and some playing cards into the hands of the flash-fried skeleton sharing your camp, give him a name and include him in conversation, maybe assign him a watch shift before you turned in.

“C’mon,” she says, freeing her hand when he doesn’t move and disappearing around a corner. Lights flicker overhead and in the pods, leaving him in long seconds of total darkness, following her echoing steps. She’s moving fast, and for a minute he’s stuck in a nightmare when he runs to catch up, turns the wrong corner and goes down a long corridor lined with flickering bodies, her steps fading to silence behind him.

“Nora?” he shouts, taking a deep breath, insisting to the nerves jumping up his spine that the walls aren’t closing in, that the little hisses he can barely make out are the vents pushing air, not pods just out of sight cracking open, the old-world corpses crawling out…

“Over here,” she calls, and he backtracks, finds the right turn and wheezes out a lungful of panic when he spots her at the end of another row. She’s got her arms crossed tight and half-hunches over them like she’s just taken Cait’s favourite slugger to the stomach. 

There’s an open pod behind her, the seat soaked, machinery chugging hard as it tries to freeze the entire chamber, but she’s staring at the one across from it. It holds another man, a young guy that somehow reminds him of the big ghoul back in DC, whether it’s the massive build or the marks of stress lining his cheeks and sagging under his eyes, and…hell.

“This was Nate,” she whispers, like he needs the introduction.

He flicks his gaze away from the frozen corpse and jerks his chin at the open pod. “So that was you?”

She nods, tries to speak, and gives up with a hard shudder.

“We don’t have to be here,” he tries again. “Or I…I could leave you alone for a little while, if that’s what you need.”

It’s almost a relief when she shakes her head, even if his skin’s more determined to crawl off his body with every minute they stand there. He feels it in his gut, that if he left her here, she’d never come out. Like all those old corpses would swarm her, jam her back in that pod to freeze again with them, where she belongs.

“You should know all this,” she whispers, “but I…I don’t have the words. And if I remember for too long…”

She shakes her head again, tightening her arms, and moves away when he reaches for her. _Right_ , he thinks, remembering the times she’d argued viciously instead of recreationally, finally catching the pattern. He should have seen it earlier, really, but it’s not like he’d had company for that stretch of the road himself.

So he gives her some space and looks in a few other pods, checking their read-outs. Someone murdered them all at once, deliberately setting the life support to force “asphyxiation” (which he’s never heard of but must be bad, from the looks on their faces) before putting the whole vault back on ice. It doesn’t make any sense.

“You said they killed your neighbors, right?” he asks softly. “You meant in here, I guess?”

She nods, not looking at him.

“And you were in there,” he points to the open pod, “when, what, someone broke in?”

She nods again.

“And that’s why you couldn’t do anything?” he asks, some of the picture falling into place. “Because you were stuck like a kid in a refrigerator.”

“If you want to know why,” she whispers, “I can’t tell you. It was the Institute, but how they knew Shaun even existed, or what they’re doing with him…”

She rubs her eyes and sniffs hard. He wishes she’d cry. He doesn’t want to see it, but it’d help her.

“I was holding him.” She grinds the words out like chewing through nails. “When the news came, and the sirens started. Codsworth had just changed his diaper, but he was still crying… Nate took him, told me to run as fast as I could, he’d be right on my heels. And he wouldn’t let him go, not when those bastards tricked us into these pods, saying we had to be decontaminated, not when Kellogg came to take him. Everyone around us screaming, banging on the lids, but Nate just held tight, and Kellogg shot him.”

MacCready steps closer to the pod, suppressing a shiver. The hole in the man’s temple, just below the blond crew cut, looks like a .44, very close range, hardly any blood. He would’ve gone out like a light.

“Looks like it was quick. Like he didn’t suffer, I mean,” he tells her, wondering if that’s any comfort.

“He didn’t,” she agrees quietly, and hiccups. “But still, after all the bad deaths I’ve seen out here, this is the picture I can’t shake, those nights sleep doesn’t come fast enough.”

“Nora…” He trails off, unable to keep his eyes off her husband now. Even under the frost, the man’s got a despairing expression that tears at him.

“I know this is ghoulish.” She comes close enough to touch him, taking his elbow instead of his hand, and retreats down the corridor with a quick look over her shoulder. “We don’t have to talk here.”

He doesn’t tell her how glad he is to hear that, letting her lead them back through the mausoleum and into an Overseer’s office. He can’t help but take a long look at the skeleton still sitting in the chair, wondering if that was someone she knew, too. She walks past it and into an armoury cage, pointing at a locked gun case and putting on a rough approximation of her old _ain’t I a silly Vaultie?_ smile. It hurts to see.

“We’re not just here for a stagger down memory lane. I also wanted to take another crack at this.”

He turns his attention to the gun rather than the fragile face she doesn’t want him staring at. It reminds him of the pods behind them, some kind of freezing tech built into the projectiles.

“If I can ever get him out, his name will be ‘Mr Freeze’. Like ‘Mr Freis’…a bit of a joke no one else will get.”

“That’s not real funny, Nor,” he tells her, keeping his voice soft.

“It’s not supposed to be,” she says, fishing the screwdriver and little box of bobby pins out of her bag, twisting one into a pick. “It’s…whistling past the graveyard.”

“That’s a great way to attract ferals,” he grumbles.

She closes her eyes and takes a few breaths before starting to work the lock.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she quietly tells the lock. “If I’d just kept hold of Shaun, it would’ve been me back there, and Nate would already have Shaun free.”

“Nora, you can’t – ”

“Nate was a real soldier, a commander,” she talks over him. “He would’ve loved the Brotherhood, would’ve gotten on with Danse like a house on fire, would’ve marched the whole regiment right into the Institute and ripped it apart, shaken the pieces until Shaun fell out, and they’d be safe and happy right now. Instead, Shaun’s stuck with me.”

The bobby pin snaps. She locates another by touch and twists it viciously into shape, still staring at the lock. He keeps his teeth together and lets her force it out.

“I didn’t think…when I woke up, it was like no time had passed. And it was all I could do just to not die before I found our old house, and Codsworth, and even after he told me how long I’d been out, I still didn’t think, maybe… I was looking for my baby. But then Nick recognised Kellogg from my description, and told me he’d been living in Diamond City a little while before with a boy who looked a lot like me… I’m an idiot.”

Her pin snaps again. He wordlessly hands her another, holding his breath.

“Shaun’s ten, now. All that back there…it was more than a decade ago. They’ve been hurting him for… I’ve lost so much time with him… Suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t a hundred years, that those bastards had him his whole life and there’s nothing left but to kill them all.”

She gets the pin past the first two tumblers and snaps it again on the stubborn third, dropping the broken pieces and stabbing her screwdriver into the glass. It doesn’t penetrate, only sheers off the mesh-reinforced barrier with an ugly squeal.

He grabs her hand as gently as he can and works the screwdriver out of her white-knuckled grip. His stomach hurts at the thought of waking up to a ten-year-old Duncan, a stranger who wouldn’t even recognise him. He tries to imagine wading through the mess of the Commonwealth without knowing he could lock that fear away, the Duncan was safe and waiting, that they’d be able to pick up right where they left off as soon as he was better, and feels sick.

Nora finally lets him have the screwdriver and leans forward to rest her forehead on the scratched glass, her stiff posture slumping.

“Shaun needs me to be a hell of a lot more than I am,” she whispers. “That’s the only thing keeping me together. If I look back…”

She shudders. He rubs his thumb over her cold fingers, but doubts she feels it.

“If – when – I get him home, chances are good I’ll be nothing but a puddle of tears and gin everyone’s got to step around. And if I break into the Institute, find him, and can’t get us out…fuck, I don’t care who they’re hurting, what or who I have to do to convince them, but I’ll join up. I’ll stay there and protect him.”

She finally turns her head enough to look at him, and there’s still no tears in her eyes, just a strange shamed wince. “And if I fail, if I’m too late…I don’t think there’s anything that could keep me here. I’m not strong enough.”

She’ll just fight with him if he disagrees, insists that she’s one of the strongest people he knows, and she’s got a bad habit of winning arguments that only hurt her. So he gropes instead for something to throw her off track, something stupid and meaningless, like…

“What’s gin?”

She actually sobs at that, and he panics a little, but there’s a watery sliver of a smile when she rubs her face and moans, “There’s no gin left? This world really isn’t worth living in.”

He waits out the deep breath, her lungs hitching on sobs she won’t let free, until she continues, “It’s something like vodka, except drunk on occasions you don’t hate yourself.”

“I’ll find you a bottle,” he insists, letting his mouth run. “Even if I’ve got to crack every vault on the east coast. I’ll bring back enough to fill a tub, and then we can keep all the tears and booze contained outta everyone’s way until Shaun’s got you cheered up enough to crawl out.”

She slumps to the floor and buries her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, but in between the desperate gasps for air are those snorts through her nose she gets when she’s trying not to laugh. 

“Goddammit, Mac,” she hiccups, her voice catching on sobs. “You’re supposed to be walking away from this mess. Not making jokes.”

He drops his pack and carefully sits next to her, close but not touching. There’s still not a lot he can think to say to her she won’t argue with, or come across like just another too-heavy expectation thrown on her back. When he opens his mouth, what comes out is: “We, uh, we made the mistake of holing up in a metro station one night.”

He tries to swallow the knot in his throat and wonders if he can get through this. She sniffs hard again and rests her hands on her knees, giving him an anxious, confused look.

“It wasn’t too far from Rivet City, and we were tired, so we didn’t scout it out as far back as we should’ve,” he continues carefully. “Turned out it was infested with ferals, and when Lucy got the fire going, they...”

He takes a deep breath and stares at his boots, trying not to picture it. “Duncan was just learning to walk, and he was restless after being carried all day, so I thought I’d give Lucy a break. I was holding his hands, helping him balance, and he’d walked us nearly back to the entrance when…they were on her. Tore her to pieces right there, just, gone, in a moment.”

“Jesus, Mac,” she whispers.

“I didn’t even get a shot off. Just grabbed Duncan and ran. Barely made it to the Rivet City bridge ahead of them. Security there killed them off, but wouldn’t let me in since I’d led the ferals to their doorstep.”

He pushes his hat back, rubs his forehead with shaking fingers. “Picked up a contract about a year later, tracked the guy to that station and killed him there. Wasn’t any trace left of her, of us. Didn’t expect there’d be, really.”

Her hand’s on his knee, though he’s not sure when that happened, so he covers it with his. Her eyes are red and shining and overflow when she blinks, and it’s strange that she’ll cry over his family but not her own, and stranger that it almost warms him to see it.

“I hope that Rivet City’s been overrun with ferals,” she says vehemently. “Not the usual kind, but the really nasty ones out in the glowing sea.”

“It’s a Steel settlement,” he shrugs. “They don’t go in for helping people, not anymore.”

He shifts his feet restlessly, tapping on her fingers, before he can tell her, “A lot of the time, I was sure we’d have been better off dying in there with her. I, uh, I had some real bad nights, when I was down to just a handful of bullets, and once, when there was only one left and I was maybe a day’s walk from Lamplight…”

He trails off and risks a quick look at her, but there’s no disgust in her expression. Just a hardness to her jaw he’s pretty sure is lingering rage at a rusty old shipful of jerks she’ll never meet and clean streaks on her face where she’s rubbed away tears. He shifts to get an arm around her, carefully, and she doesn’t pull away.

“Okay,” she murmurs, “you win the misery olympics.”

“It’s not – ” he starts heatedly, but she pulls her head back to show him a half-smile. Her eyes are still bleak, but it’s maybe a good sign she’s trying, so he lets the bad joke go with an irritated grunt. “I just mean, what you’re talking about, I can’t run away from that anyway. If you want to be with me, if those are the risks…I’m in.”

He feels her head move against his shoulder, her hair tickling his neck.

“I…I care about you, and I want to see where this goes, but… I’m not over my old life. I still love Nate, and I’d give anything to…to be that wife again, mother of a new baby, bad days behind us and so much hope for the future.” She huffs out a humourless laugh. “To be a Super Duper Mart housewife instead of the Commonwealth’s most prolific serial killer. Are you really ok with that?”

He almost wishes he could have seen her that way, even if that woman would never have given him a second look (except maybe to clutch her purse tighter as he passed), even if she was wasted pretending to be something soft and decorative. It’s not a Nora he’ll ever know.

“It’s been years and I still miss Lucy. Don’t think that’ll ever stop hurting, her being gone. But lately…maybe it’s having someone to lean on again, but it’s gotten easier to remember her. Who she was, instead of just trying not to think about how she died. It’s been good, actually.” He shrugs, feeling his shoulders tighten defensively. “She wasn’t the kinda person who’d want me to be alone forever. I’m sure Nate was the same.”

“Oh god, no,” Nora bursts out, with a rusty caw of laughter. “That’s exactly what Nate would’ve wanted. When his squad was on furlough, we’d have his friends over and he’d inevitably end up declaring…”

She clears her throat, lowers her voice and clips off the ends of her words even harder. “My Nora, our darling Mrs Freis…you mark my words, when I fall in battle serving our country, within the year you’ll all still be gathering here to toast my sacrifice, but calling her ‘Mrs Sadiki’ or ‘Mrs Fedele’.” 

The laugh hitches in her throat. “With Aziz and Tony’s wives right there in the kitchen with me! And we’d all hoot and pour another round down our throats, but no, he wasn’t joking. Guess he had a point, in the end.”

“Nor, no offense, but that was kind of a…kind of a jerk thing for him to say about his wife,” he frowns, wondering if she’s particularly got a thing for guys who jam their feet in their mouths.

“The more accurate term you’re swerving around is ‘inveterate asshole,’ and yeah, he was. The best kind.” She shivers a little and sighs. “Okay. If you want me, I’m in too. No regrets.”

He squeezes her shoulders until her neck creaks and it’s a few minutes before he can tell her, “One condition.”

“After all this, you have a condition?” Her voice rises and breaks again.

“You can write up a contract, if you agree,” he shrugs. “Just…clean up the language before Duncan catches up to us, huh? I really don’t want him to grow into a little jerk like I was.”

She tilts her head back until it hits the mesh behind them. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

He shakes his head again. “I’m really not.”

She closes her eyes and moves her lips like she’s counting to ten, then twenty, and finally says, “Fifty-percent reduction in cursing is a much more reasonable expectation.”

“One hundred,” he insists. “At least with the big ones.”

“Those are my favorites. I can maybe give you seventy-five across the board.”

“One hundred,” he says again, starting to smile.

“Only outside of battle,” she replies firmly. “And fucking. And any kind of medical treatment, giving or receiving. And…”

“Any time Duncan could overhear you,” he interrupts, and takes her sigh as agreement. “Deal?”

She shrugs his arm off her shoulders and clambers to her feet, glaring as his smile only grows, before offering him a hand up, kissing him on the cheek once he’s in range. 

“Deal,” she says, “…asshole. Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, this was originally supposed to be a quick ten pages of porn...


End file.
